Wasp Hand

by Jonathan Moeller

  “Agreed,” said March, and he unlocked the strong room door.

  “I always seem to see unpleasant things in there,” said Caird.

  “We’re not about to break the pattern,” said March, and he lifted Stormreel’s box, put it on the deck, and closed the door.

  “I really hope you have beer in there,” said Caird.

  “I don’t,” said March, and he flipped open the box, reached into the packing peanuts, and lifted out the quantum beacon. Adelaide flinched, and Caird’s eyes narrowed.

  Elizabeth stepped closer, gazing in fascination at the device.

  “That looks like a quantum inducer,” said Adelaide. “But a lot bigger.”

  “You know what a quantum inducer is?” said Caird.

  “I bet I found out about it the same way you did,” said Adelaide. “The hard way.”

  “No argument there,” said Caird.

  “The Navy’s scientists think this thing is a communications device of some kind,” said March. “Some kind of beacon. So, they call it a quantum beacon.”

  “I can feel it, Mal,” said Elizabeth. “I can sense it. It exists simultaneously in both your universe and hyperspace.”

  March didn’t dare look at her, lest Adelaide ask what he was looking at.

  “Where did you find this thing?” said Caird.

  “I took it from our old friend Lorre,” said March.

  “Lorre had this?” said Adelaide, her voice sharp.

  “Let me guess,” said Caird. “You met Lorre the hard way, too?”

  “Yeah,” said Adelaide. “I did.”

  “Lorre was using this thing in a prototype project,” said March. “We went up against each other. He got away, but I captured this device, and Stormreel thinks we can use it to defeat the Wasps.”

  “I can sense it, Mal,” said Elizabeth. “I’ve sensed things like this a long time ago, long before your race ever learned how to come to hyperspace. There was a great war that lasted longer than you can imagine, and the race that came from outside reality used these to speak among themselves. Then the war stopped, and silence fell in hyperspace until humans built hyperdrives.”

  “Any idea how we can use it to defeat the Wasps?” said Adelaide.

  “Damned if I know,” said Caird, but his eyes were distant. “The admiral must have something clever up his sleeve.”

  “You think he knows what he’s doing?” said March.

  “I can sense this thing anywhere,” said Elizabeth. “Across any distance. Take it to a galaxy at the far end of the universe, and I will still be able to find it.”

  Could that be Stormreel’s plan? March couldn’t see how. If Caird could sense the quantum beacon anywhere, he could plot a hyperspace jump to it with ease. Yet how would that destroy the Wasp nestship?

  Caird snorted. “I’m not allowed to speak ill of senior officers.”

  “There are fifteen million people on Vesper’s World,” said March. “Do you think his plan can save them?”

  Caird said nothing as he and Elizabeth stared at the greenish-blue shape of the quantum beacon. An idle thought occurred to March. Many of the relics of the Great Elder Ones that he had encountered looked vaguely insectile. Perhaps the Great Elder Ones had encountered the Eumenidae long ago.

  “I don’t know,” said Caird at last. “Nothing is ever certain in battle. You know that as well as I do.” March nodded. “But…Admiral Stormreel wins a lot. I’ve seen him win. He wouldn’t still be a Lord Admiral if he didn’t win consistently. You’ve met him, right? The man is an unpleasant, arrogant ass.”

  “So much for not speaking ill of senior officers,” said Adelaide in a dry voice.

  “He has those nasty little tests he likes to give people,” said Caird. “He probably used one on you when you first met him.” March nodded again. “But he is a genius. I don’t say that lightly. Some of the Fleet’s senior officers are dumber than boxes of slag. Worse, some of them think they’re brilliant when they’re idiots. But Stormreel is as exactly as smart as he thinks he is.”

  “Seems like he thinks he’s pretty damn smart,” said March.

  “He is,” said Caird. “I hate to admit it, but he is that smart.”

  “The Lord Admiral sees far and deeply,” said Elizabeth. “Vision is a rare quality in a human.”

  “Well,” said Adelaide, “he said only four people in the Seventh Fleet know about the relics, and three of us are a Navigator, a privateer, and an archaeologist. I hope that plan of his is a damned good one.”

  March put the quantum beacon back into the box and closed the lid. Elizabeth kept staring at it even after the lid was closed.

  “Guess we’ll find out,” said March.

  Something buzzed, and Caird pulled his phone from his belt.

  “And we’re about to find out right now,” said Caird. He hit a button on the phone. “Admiral?”

  “Commander Caird,” said Stormreel, his voice calm and nasal as ever. “Are Captain March and Dr. Taren with you?”

  “They are, sir,” said Caird.

  “Excellent,” said Stormreel. “Please report to the CIC with Captain March and Dr. Taren at once. You will take your station, and I have a separate task for the others.”

  “Acknowledged, sir,” said Caird. “We’re on our way.”

  He broke the connection and returned the phone to his belt. March put the box with the quantum beacon back into the strong room and locked the door.

  “Well,” said Adelaide. “Suppose we shouldn’t keep the admiral waiting.”

  “No,” said March.

  Caird smiled. “We’ve been in a tight spot before, Captain March. We got out of that alive.”

  “We did,” said March.

  But the cost had been high. The crew of the Covenant had been lost, Lorre had escaped, and March had barely gotten the few survivors and the Wraith devices back to Calaskaran space.

  What would the cost be this time?

  Chapter 8: The Beacon

  March and Adelaide followed Caird onto the cavernous hangar deck.

  The intensity of activity had only increased. More Phalanx-class heavy fighters had been ferried onto the deck, and the armorers rushed towards them, mounting missiles on the starfighters' hardpoints. A constant cacophony of shouted orders and clanging metal and whirring motors filled the air. Four men might have crewed each Phalanx-class heavy fighter, but behind each fighter was a team of a dozen men keeping the craft repaired, functional, and armed.

  “God, this place is huge,” said Adelaide, looking around.

  Caird looked back at her, Elizabeth walking at his side. A technician stepped right through Elizabeth without realizing it. “You’ve never been on a fleet carrier before?”

  “It doesn’t come up too often in an archaeologist’s career,” said Adelaide in a dry voice. She glanced towards the ceiling. “I'm surprised this hangar doesn’t get its own weather.”

  “Actually, it does,” said Caird. “The hangars on the Roncesvalles are big enough that they need special environmental equipment to keep clouds and even rainstorms from forming near the ceiling.”

  March grunted. “I suppose that would be expensive to fix.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Caird. “If it drizzles in the hangar bay, all kinds of important equipment gets fried, and that leads to an unpleasant chat with Naval Procurement.”

  They reached a row of doors leading to the carrier’s lift system a few hundred meters down from the pilot ready room. There was a line at every door, but fortunately, Caird outranked the men in line, so he ordered them out of the way. A few minutes later March, Adelaide, and Caird were in a packed lift car speeding its way through the massive ship to the CIC. Both March and Adelaide attracted curious stares (with far more of them directed Adelaide’s way), but March ignored them. Adelaide kept her face in the sober mask he had seen her use when narrating video documentaries about serious subjects.

  After a short ride, the car stopped, the doors hissed open, and March steppe
d into the Roncesvalles’s Combat Information Center.

  The CIC was twice as large as the operations center on Vesper Station. Rows of consoles lined the walls, with officers and technicians monitoring fire control, shields, life support, engines, and a host of other systems. A raised platform in the center held the executive officers’ stations, and the captain’s massive chair looked like a combination of a throne and a piece of industrial artwork. Several holograms floated overhead, showing an overview of the ship’s systems and status reports from the hangars, shield control, and fire control.

  Ensign Jordan awaited them just outside the lift car.

  “Commander Caird, sir,” he said, saluting. “The Lord Admiral had sent me to escort Captain March and Dr. Taren to his office.”

  “Very good, Ensign,” said Caird, returning the salute. He looked back at March and Adelaide. “This is where we part ways, I think. Good luck.”

  “You, too,” said March, and Caird strode towards the navigational stations below the command platform. Elizabeth gave March one final look, and he wondered what was going on in that alien mind.

  Then she turned and strolled after Caird.

  “This way, Captain March, Dr. Taren,” said Jordan.

  March followed the ensign through the bustling hive of the CIC to one of the balconies that overlooked the room. One set of stairs led to the captain’s office. Another led to the Lord Admiral’s. They followed Jordan up the stairs, to a pair of double doors, and into the office.

  Stormreel’s office looked just as eccentric as March would have expected.

  The lights were dimmer than the CIC, and shelves held an array of paper books and archaic weapons – swords and spears and crossbows and the like. A screen behind the admiral’s desk displayed constant updates of the ship’s status, along with a view of the surrounding stars. Stormreel himself sat behind his massive steel slab of a desk, holograms floating over its surface.

  There were three other men in the office standing before the admiral’s desk. The first was Captain Donaghy. The second was a wiry youngish-looking man in the red flight suit of a Calaskaran fighter pilot, a major’s insignia on his chest. The final man looked like a bouncer at a spaceport bar, with bulging chest and arms, his knuckles thick, his nose crooked, his ears showing signs of frequent impacts. The thuggish-looking man wore a Calaskaran Navy uniform with a captain’s insignia.

  “Thank you, Ensign,” said Stormreel. “You may wait outside.” Jordan saluted and stepped back onto the balcony, the door hissing closed behind him. “Captain March, Dr. Taren, welcome. You already know Captain Donaghy. May I introduce Major Niles Cameron, one of our squadron commanders, and Captain Manuel Alacon, the commanding officer of the RCS Roncesvalles.”

  March and Adelaide shook hands with Cameron and Alacon. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Never had much use for privateers myself,” said Alacon. “But that was some fine shooting when you showed up.”

  “That’s right,” said Cameron. March recognized his clipped voice from the battle against the Wasp interceptors. “These bug bastards fight hard enough that I’ll not turn away any help.”

  “That is the purpose of this meeting,” said Stormreel. His voice was quiet, but the naval officers turned their attention to him at once. “The Eumenidae nestship is just over five days away from Vesper’s World. Should the nestship reach Vesper’s World, the lives of the fifteen million colonists upon the planet will be forfeit, to say nothing of the lives already lost upon Vesper Station. If that nestship reaches Vesper’s World, in a matter of weeks the Eumenidae will start producing more nestships and capital warships. The Kingdom of Calaskar will face an alien war of immense scale. The Machinists will almost certainly take advantage of the situation, assuming the Eumenidae do not turn upon them first, for they recognize neither friend nor ally. A war on that scale might cost trillions of lives. That is the gravity of the situation, gentlemen.”

  No one said anything.

  “But thanks to Captain March and Dr. Taren,” said Stormreel, “we yet have a chance to avert all that. To defeat the Eumenidae invasion before it can begin.”

  “What do you mean, sir?” said Alacon.

  “The Wasp nestship,” said Stormreel, and he tapped a key on his desk’s computer terminal. The air rippled a little, and a holographic image of a Eumenidae nestship appeared. March wondered if Stormreel had somehow gotten a picture of the nestship in the Vesper system, or if he had dug the image out of the archives of the Fifth Empire.

  “That will be the key,” said Donaghy.

  “Yes,” said Stormreel. “The Wasp queens are aboard the nestship, and they are in control of the entire swarm of Eumenidae in the Vesper system. Kill them, and the swarm will collapse into chaos. For that matter, the nestship itself is the key to victory. Bombard it with enough neutron bombs, and the resultant radiation poisoning and coding errors introduced into the Eumenidae DNA will kill the ship and spread through the rest of the Wasps.” Stormreel leaned back in his chair. “The problem is that the nestship generates an enormous gravitic distortion field. The strength of the Wasp gravitic shielding appears to increase based on the available surface area of their ships. Consequently, the nestship’s shield extends several hundred kilometers from its hull. We will have to penetrate the gravitic shield before we can destroy the nestship.”

  Alacon frowned. “We might need the rest of the Seventh Fleet for that kind of firepower, sir. Maybe support from the other Fleets as well.”

  Stormreel smiled. “We do not. All we need is the Tiger.”

  Alacon’s frown sharpened. March understood the feeling.

  “One privateer vessel is not going to decide the battle, sir,” said Alacon.

  “At the right time and the right place, it shall,” said Stormreel. “Just as the right man at the proper time and place can decide the course of a battle or even an empire. And as it happens, the Tiger has been fitted with a piece of highly classified technology.”

  “Ah,” said Alacon, understanding coming over his rough face. “That’s why you went to Vesper Station, isn’t it? Not to inspect the defenses. To bring this piece of technology to the Fleet.”

  “That is correct, Captain,” said Stormreel. “I had hoped for more time to prepare, but unfortunately the Eumenidae chose not to give us that time. I will not divulge any details of this device. The mere knowledge of its existence is highly dangerous, and the fewer people who know of it, the safer we shall all be. Additionally, Dr. Taren has made a most fortuitous discovery.” Alacon’s gaze considered her, and Cameron frowned. “She unearthed the dark energy scanning method that the Fourth and Fifth Empire used to pinpoint the location of Eumenidae starships. That will give us a potent tactical advantage. Due to their high dark energy radiation signature, we will know exactly where the Eumenidae nestship is at all times. Captain March?”

  “Admiral,” said March.

  Stormreel’s dark eyes settled on him. “When we have finished this discussion, you will depart the Roncesvalles and head to the Vesper system. Your mission is to then get within one hundred kilometers of the nestship. Most likely you will need to jump to the edge of the system, locate the nestship, and then jump as close as your computer can calculate. You will probably need to proceed the remaining distance using your fusion drive.”

  “That’s suicide, sir,” said Alacon. “There’s no way one blockade runner would last that long against that many enemy ships.”

  “Entirely correct, Captain,” said Stormreel. “Which is why, Major Cameron, your squadron is assigned the task of escorting the Tiger to its destination. The Phalanx starfighters are hyperdrive-capable, and the Tiger’s computer is sufficiently powerful to calculate the jump for all of you.”

  “What are we supposed to do once we arrive within a hundred kilometers of the nestship, sir?” said Cameron. “We can fit a few neutron bombs to the Phalanxes, but their hardpoints aren’t large enough to accommodate proper anti-capital ship ordinance.”

&nb
sp; “There will be no need,” said Stormreel. “If you can get the Tiger to within one hundred kilometers of the nestship, and stay there for three to five minutes, that will be sufficient. The device fitted to the Tiger will handle the rest.”

  “If I can be blunt, Admiral,” said Alacon, “this is a very vague plan.”

  “I am unable to provide any further details for operational security,” said Stormreel. “It is possible that you will be captured, and the Wasps would extract compromising details from your memory. But I do not send my men on suicide missions, Captain. It is dangerous, yes, but I have every expectation that we will succeed.”

  “If it can be done, Admiral,” said Cameron, “me and my boys will get it done.”

  “Very good, Major,” said Stormreel. “You are dismissed. I want your squadron and the Tiger to leave in one hour. Are there any questions?” There were none. “Captain Alacon, I want the Roncesvalles and the rest of our ships ready for immediate hyperspace travel.”

  “It will be done, sir,” said Alacon. He saluted, as did the rest of the officers, and they left the admiral’s office.

  ###

  March stepped into the cargo hold, the airlock cycling closed behind him and Taren.

  “Do you think the admiral’s plan will work?” said Taren.

  “I don’t know,” said March. He looked at her. She looked good even in the harsh lighting of the cargo bay. “It might.”

  She sighed and paced a few steps. “What do you think he intends?”

  “A hyperspace jump,” said March in a quiet voice. “Do you remember how the Royal Navy won the battle at Martel’s World?”

  Adelaide stopped pacing. “Somehow the Navy calculated an incredibly accurate hyperspace jump that dropped their capital ships right on top of the Machinist fleet. The Navy blasted the Machinist ships to hell before they had even realized what had happened.”

  March nodded. “Malcolm Caird was the helmsman of the Roncesvalles for that battle.”

  “He was?” said Adelaide, her eyes widening. “Then…you think that’s what Stormreel plans? A hyperspace jump to put the Fleet right on top of the nestship before the Wasps can respond?”