That hadn’t been anticipated during the training evolutions, but Reis would have used the same formation to deal with it. He reached out to the floating icons, tasking three cruisers from the rear of neighboring cones to fire on each of the two interlopers.
Though he trusted in the initiative of his commanders, he didn’t want half of his anchor ships deciding to deal with two enemy ships. A honeycomb was a very hands-on type of formation for a commander.
“Both enemy vessels destroyed,” the sensor tech announced.
“The Ayani isn’t responding to hails,” the communications officer warned, updating the cruiser’s icon in orange. “She may be fighting off a boarding party?”
Reis glared at the man. The comms officer knew as well as any Krypteian that a ship out of contact was a ship you couldn’t afford to leave in action. It would mean another three heavy cruisers standing picket over the ship until they could confirm her status.
If they didn’t answer hails, then they weren’t under control, and the communications officer had no business making the next order harder for Reis.
“Destroy the Ayani and return the picket to attack positions.”
The communications officer nodded with an angle to his head, a subtle acknowledgement of his slip, and updated the order list for the picket vessels that had destroyed the enemy attacking the Ayani.
They had been too late to save her, and now they had to destroy her before she could be turned against them.
Reis realized that he didn’t know the captain of the Ayani. He saw no point in asking either – he knew he would lose a few more captains before the day was done and some of them would certainly be friends. There had been a time when he knew every captain under his command, but he’d been forced to scrape this force together from a half dozen worlds. He had to trust in their judgement.
He took a deep breath. “Hold formation and press forward.”
And then, suddenly, a new variable was added to the equation.
A Task Force’s Best Friend
The Salamis, Near Chula 565
Harry knew he’d found the right spot as soon as the data started coming in. If they could force a fight here, they could make the enemy dance to an Alliance tune. Chula 565 was a brute of a planet; a massive sphere of carbon that pulled greedily at the fabric of space time.
“Lovely,” Colonel Adams drawled, waving his hand over the trace table. A data call-out appeared, describing the weather front they were looking at down on the surface of the sinister world. “Not the kind of rain I’d want to go singing in.”
“Not unless you want a mouthful of benzene every time you tilt your head up,” Commander Flemming observed with a dry tone. “And at eight times the size of Earth, I doubt you’d be doing much more than laying on your back, trying to catch your breath.”
The carbon planet had been mapped centuries ago by Weiran prospectors, constantly searching for raw materials for ship hulls. Three large mining operations had existed on the planet’s surface, but the departure of Weirfall from the Republic had removed this world from their list of safe resource planets. The gravity compensators at the mining sites had been shut down three years ago, and the habitats were nothing more than empty shells, covered in a slick glaze of hydrocarbons.
“Asphyxiating in the rain,” Prouse grinned, uncharacteristically cheerful, now that action was pending. “Might be a good idea to set up a parody contest, once we’re done here.”
“Let’s make sure we take care of the enemy first,” Harry said mildly, setting the table back to the operational view. “What’s the probability of them passing along this line?” He looked up at Flemming.
The intelligence officer cleared his throat. “Eighty percent for a close pass, high nineties for us to pull them back into normal space. I suppose it would be too much to ask them to travel in nice organized waves?”
“We might get a few lucky kills,” Harry replied doubtfully. “I’m pretty sure these are going to be experienced security troops. You’re the one telling us that the civil unrest indicators have been going up on the fringe worlds whenever the enemy builds a concentration of forces.”
“They’re getting so desperate for a quick resolution that they’re stripping the counter-insurgency forces from nearby worlds.” Prouse looked as though he might start dancing a jig at any moment. “We keep holding onto our three little worlds and they’ll run right out of forces. They won’t even be able to enforce tariffs, let alone fight rebels!”
Prouse brought his right hand up to touch his ear. “Sir, the captured frigate is in place.” He looked up at Harry. “Standing by to initiate.”
Harry nodded. “Make a hole.”
The senior staff all looked out the port side of the bridge. There was a brilliant flash where the frigate had been and then the explosion seemed to shrink back to its origin point.
And then there was nothing.
Breaking the String
The Hexi Zoulang, Tauhentan Space
“New contact,” the sensor tech shouted. “Twenty Human vessels on the ventral flank.”
Reis subconsciously performed the small muscle exercises that helped to bleed off the sudden surge of adrenaline. He still had the larger force and he had no intention of breaking off his attack on the Midgaard. He reached up to his order of battle tables and touched a finger to three of the maniple groupings. He dragged the finger down towards the Humans who were attacking from below and the corresponding ship icons duplicated, their ghost versions following his finger toward the new enemy force.
The original icons began to move almost instantly, redeploying to hold off the late arrivals. Fifteen could hold twenty long enough for the main force to smash the impudent Midgaard.
Make that nine…
“New contact! Same bearing as the last but closer.” The sensor tech was gripping the edges of his console, knuckles white and straining. “We’ve lost six ships from the response force to their drop wash.
Hells! Reis redeployed another three maniples, committing a total of twenty four ships to hold forty.
But that left his main force on an almost even footing with the Midgaard force. The enemy’s brash confidence no longer seemed so ill advised. And they were now outnumbered heavily on the ventral flank. His eyes grew large. Had he acted too rashly in dispatching the second reinforcement? Had he fallen back on battle drills like a raw captain of the regular forces when he should have relied on his own initiative?
The remaining nine ships could have held the new arrivals for at least a hundredth of a day before they were destroyed. His forty five ships could have pressed the Midgaard with reckless ferocity, crushed them, and then, if enough remained of his force, he could have turned on the forty new arrivals.
Though he knew he was right, it was too late to recall the second response maniples. He fought the urge to curse at the lost opportunity. He had allowed the enemy to control the decision cycle. He was reacting to the enemy’s movements when he should have been the one calling the shots. He was a flota of the Krypteian order, a force multiplier in his own right but he’d failed to see that the enemy was pushing him around like a pawn on a Shakh-Maht board.
Nothing to do but to push the…
“New contact!” The sensor tech turned to him, his features barely under control. “Twenty more Earthers, right on the edge of our ventral flank! We’ve lost eight more to drop wash on top of the eight we’ve lost to gunnery!”
Three waves so far. Each one closer than the last. Three waves of plasma and weapons fire, growing closer with each arrival.
Reis was outnumbered on two fronts now. There was no battle drill for this, and initiative was no longer an option. No bold stroke would save thirty eight fully engaged ships from an enemy force that was more than twice their size. It was a straight up slug fest.
The unthinkable tried to intrude and he pushed it angrily aside. He was no gods-cursed insurgent and yet, the insurgents had survived to plague the Republic for centuries. It gal
led him to realize that he was giving it serious thought, but he was bleeding strength and there was only one decision left to him that the enemy wasn’t dictating.
And then he understood.
“Son of a clone!” he muttered. This may well have been the enemy’s intent from the very beginning.
“Pardon, Flota?” his second blurted. He had been standing nearby in a fit of growing agitation as he watched the battle fall apart. He was a good officer but a little over-zealous in his secondary role as the political commissar.
“Signal the fleet,” he snapped. “We’re to fall back in good order to Gaemhaeg station.”
It was the first time his second officer had ever failed to jump to any order.
“The situation cannot be redeemed,” he said quietly. “Signal the fleet now!”
Gaemhaeg, in orbit around Xo’Kam, was very close to Dactar. That couldn’t be helped, but it was heavily guarded and he didn’t want to run the risk of dropping out only to find the enemy had pursued them in the hopes of finishing them off.
He was reasonably certain that they wouldn’t. If he was right, then he was dealing with a brilliant enemy commander. One who thought, not just in terms of destroying vessels, but rather of destroying his enemy’s resolve.
They were hoping he’d take the news of this defeat to Gaemhaeg so it could spread. He reached up to the holo controls as the ship shuddered out of regular space. He brought up a system overview, showing the three worlds now under Alliance control.
He felt a new surge of hope as he saw the travel corridors that linked the worlds. He re-set the holo with a wave and turned for his quarters. “You have the conn,” he called to his second as he passed through the door at the back of the bridge.
He would give this force the victory it needed. He would multiply their effectiveness in a way that a stand up battle never would. They would make the Alliance the victims of their own success.
But first, he needed to work out the details. The fleet could continue to Gaemhaeg for now.
Discovery
The Kinzell, Lychensee
Dwight ducked past a screen of red beads and stepped back out into the warm rain. The spicy scents of the breakfast menu wafted out with him as he stopped beside Emily. It was the morning of his third day in the Kinzell, but he was only now beginning to see any of the place.
On the morning of his second day, he had confessed his true role in the creation of the plague, but she had simply nodded, as though she had been waiting to hear it. He still wasn’t sure if he found that reassuring or terrifying. How many others assumed he’d been involved in creating the deadly infection? Still, she hadn’t thrown him out.
He swatted at a small round ball that hovered just above his head, apologizing to a passing pedestrian who had to duck to avoid his elbow. It looked like the same ball that had started following him when he first arrived, three days ago. It moved higher, but it didn’t leave.
“You don’t want to do that,” Emily warned him with a tone of sweet mischief.
“Why,” Dwight asked as he glared up at the offending object.
“It’s a marketing droid,” she explained. “Supposedly sentient but I’m not entirely convinced. They observe your shopping habits and feed advertising recs to the vid panels.” She waved a hand at one of the glass panels that extended out from an alley entrance.
He looked closely and, sure enough, a window on the panel had her name in Dheema characters, along with an ad for intoxicants, vat grown meat, and electronics. He looked at her with a grin.
She shrugged. “They know what I shop for. It illustrates my point, though.”
“I don’t see how. Why does that mean that I have to be nice to them? Just because…” he trailed off as she began to laugh. He turned to see what she was looking at.
The entire screen was now dedicated to the shopping needs of Dwight Young. It even had a shot of Dwight’s angry face, no doubt taken as he glared up at the droid. Ayholi’s Butt Fungus Cream, for that itch that just won’t go away! the screen proclaimed in bold text.
Dwight could feel his ears burning. At least half of the flowing crowd noticed the ad and looked around for his face, chuckling at the embarrassing ad.
“You should really apologize,” Emily advised, barely able to keep her laughter in check long enough for the simple sentence.
“Apologize?” Dwight blurted angrily. “To a droid?”
“A sentient droid,” she corrected. “One with a devious sense of humor.” She nodded back at the screen.
Uaevery’s holistic medicinals will cure that explosive diarrhea, Dr. Young. The new ad proudly proclaimed. You’ll never spoil a hot-tub party again!
“Devious sense of humor or just a weird butt fixation?” Dwight groused. “All right!” he shouted up at the hovering ball. Passers-by laughed. “I apologize for swatting at you; can you please get off my back – or back side, in this case?”
The screen went back to the usual mix of windows. They slid upwards as the targeted individuals approached. Ads for Emily and Dwight remained at the very top as they stood there. His now had a discrete ad for an etiquette school.
He followed Emily into the seething mass of commerce, knowing he stood out like a sore thumb, but he couldn’t help gawking at the sights. Every hawker caught his eye and tried to draw him into a shop, still following him as he moved on.
“Don’t make eye-contact with the shopkeepers unless you’re interested in the merchandise,” Emily called back over her shoulder. “Otherwise it’ll take us all day to get to Rosh’s shop.”
She must have been exaggerating because it was only a twenty-minute hike. He figured they had climbed at least ten levels, though it was hard to apply a concept like levels to the exuberant sprawl.
They arrived at a small shop, perhaps ten feet across, with an ornate rug inside its open front. Two men inside got up to give her an enthusiastic greeting.
He followed Emily’s lead and left his boots on the rug, nodding politely as she introduced him to Rosh and Qut, the Yo’Thage brothers.
“They came here from Tauhento ten years ago,” she said as she accepted a steaming mug of tea with a grateful smile.
“A creative mind can be a horrible prison if you live on a world that’s only allowed to make weapons,” Rosh explained as he handed Dwight a mug. “Here in the Kinzell, there were no restrictions, as long as you kept your elected official happy.”
“He means bribe your councilor until you’re making too much money to ignore,” Qut supplied. “Then you pay even more to get a visa to whatever world is allowed to produce your big invention, but you still have to keep paying him at half rate in perpetuity.”
“But at least it lets people like you continue innovating.” Emily took a sip and closed her eyes for a few seconds. “Speaking of innovation,” she opened her eyes. “How did the test go?”
“Our concept has not been conclusively discredited,” Rosh said with a charming grin.
“You mean your Hothmoen discriminator didn’t do anything?”
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” Rosh retorted. “It sat there.” He waved helpfully at a test bed on his workbench. “It also used up power and exasperated the both of us to no end.”
“What was this discriminator supposed to do?” Dwight looked blankly at his hosts.
“Hothmoen was a great Oaxian preist,” Qut explained. “He was employed by the system’s industry on his world to increase the efficiency of heat sinks. He postulated that electromagnetic energy can only be emitted in quantized form.”
“He discovered quantum theory?” Dwight brightened.
“She said the same thing,” Qut nodded at Emily. “But Hothmoen got there more than fifteen centuries earlier.”
“Why would a priest be tinkering with physics?” Dwight scratched at the back of his head.
Rosh looked over at Emily and rolled his eyes. “Our scientists are preists, Dr. Young.”
“All of them?”
“Pre
tty much.”
Dwight frowned. “But preists deal in faith. Science is about hard facts.”
“Are you so sure?” Qut raised an eyebrow. “What you call quantum theory involves a hells of a lot of belief or, if you prefer, faith. Your people are already aware that observer expectation playes a major role in experiments. You just don’t realize how much.”
“So the two of you…”
A nod from Rosh. “We trained at a monastery near Caurtez, on our homeworld.”
“Huh.” Dwight shrugged. “So, this whatsathingy does what exactly?”
Rosh looked at Emily, getting a nod. “It’s for FTL communication.”
“Seriously?”
Qut nodded. “We have no idea how the Dactari do it. It’s one of the best kept secrets in the Republic – has been since they started using it a decade ago. We figure it can be done with a sensor that operates in the Hothmoen scale. It should let us observe wormholes that regular sensors would never catch.”
“But the sentient processor isn’t giving us the results we need,” Rosh cut back in. “It expects to see the results, but nothing happens.” He shook his head in resignation. “We call them sentient, but I think that Hothmoen Theory uses a different definition of sentient.”
“Maybe you just need a real humanoid mind to make your observations,” Dwight mused as he leaned over the test bed and closed his eyes. His implant found nothing but an illicit data hack from a nearby shop. He opened his eyes to find Emily and the two brothers staring at him.
“What are you doing?” Rosh asked.
“I was just trying to see if you had it connected to any kind of transmitter.” Dwight shrugged.
“Do you have one of those Midgaard processors in your head?” Qut put a hand on Dwight’s shoulder, an excited look on his face.
Dwight looked at him guardedly. “Yes, it was put in a week ago. What’s the big deal? I would have figured that kind of thing was child’s play here.”
“No,” Emily shook her head. “That kind of gear has always been under the strictest control in the Republic. Only a few elite units have ever been issued with something like that.”
The Orphan Alliance Page 21
