by Mark Wandrey
“I am not in orbit behind Remus any longer.”
“Why, what happened?”
“Fifteen minutes ago, another starship entered our solar system.”
* * * * *
Chapter 3
Julast 14th, 533 AE
Geosynchronous Orbit Behind the Moon Remus, Bellatrix Star System
Lilith remembered every moment of her life, going back to when she was still inside the artificially created womb the Kaatan’s Medical Intelligence fabricated to mature her from a discarded fetus to a nine-year-old girl. The ship had planned to use the time variations around a supra-luminal starship to mature her to fifteen, the ideal age to become the biological half of a Kaatan warship. Unfortunately, the unpredictable nature of the variations had resulted in her being taken from that medium several years too soon. She’d spent the last six years, or most of it, inside the ship as its sole crew member.
Occasionally, she left the Bellatrix system to wander among the stars, usually when she got bored watching the affairs of ‘her people’ from on high, or when she was confused by her own body. Recently, she’d began to see disturbing differences in her behavior. Television broadcasts from Bellatrix were more interesting than before, especially those that contained human males that were muscular and handsome. She was the Combat Intelligence of a Kaatan-class warship, one of the most formidable instruments of battle ever made! What possible interest could a mere human hold for her?
Her main duty to her people was to watch the heavens. From her quiet little outpost in close geosynchronous orbit over Remus she had a perfect view for light-years in all directions.
She knew there was little chance one of the T’Chillen warships would come here seeking revenge. They had no clue it was humans who piloted the Kaatan they’d spirited away from the fire-base in Enigma. They believed it was the Rasa, and thus had annihilated them on their own home world. If Lilith hadn’t awoken there, the T’Chillen would have claimed the Kaatan as well. Instead, the Lilith had dealt with the clunky, outmoded snakes’ spaceships and returned her passengers to Bellatrix.
While keeping the ship’s sensors trained outwards, she spent a lot of time studying human history, helping them invent new things to make humanity more powerful, and watching dramas on TV.
She’d been watching one in particular, ‘As Romulus Orbits,’ the story of a handsome man named Chad who had fought to become one of the Chosen. It was an improbably story; he was many years too old for the Trials. Right now, he was professing his love for a woman who was not interested in him. He paid particular attention to her breasts, having difficulty averting his eyes from them. They were quite large and bounced as she walked in the heavy gravity of Bellatrix.
Lilith looked down at her own breasts, such as they were. What was the human male’s fascination with mammary glands, anyway? They played no direct part in the reproductive act, at least none she’d read about in technical journals. Like her mother, who was small-busted, she was even more so. Gravity had a lot to do with how a woman’s body matured, and Lilith had only experienced it a couple of times.
Where the TV woman’s bosoms stood out full, with a lot of cleavage, her own were quite tiny and pointed. The little fat her body possessed was distributed to more important places. Lilith frowned and tried to use her hands to scoop them from the side and make them appear bigger. That was when she noticed the sensor alarms had been trying to get her attention.
She cursed in the ancient language of The People and banished the show with a wave of her hand. Surrounded by the power of the Kaatan, she extended her awareness outward. In a split-second, her mind covered a full parsec of space.
Normally there was little to look at. The space Bellatrix resided in was somewhat boring as space went. A minor pulsar and a small swarm of rare extra-solar comets were about it. But now there was the telltale evidence of the arrival of a supra-luminal ship. The distortion was unmistakable, as was its destination: Bellatrix. In a flash, she brought the ship’s drives to life, opened the FTL radio link to her mother, and told her what was happening.
“We’ll be there in thirty minutes!”
“Do not attempt that,” Lilith warned; “the ship is already entering normal space. It is inside the orbit of Valhalla, and likely we are in their sensor range.”
“Are you ready to run?” Minu asked.
“I have moved to an orbit opposite the approaching ship, but a Kaatan warship does not run.”
“That may be true, but you are alone. You don’t know what you’re facing. What if that ship is more powerful?”
Lilith snorted, something she’d picked up from her mother. She rather liked the expressive emoting without words. “Unlikely. But as you say, the drives are spun up, both gravitic and tactical. If they discover I am hiding here, your world is in serious danger. The only logical course of action at that point would be to destroy them before they can get word out.”
“Thanks, but you’re more use to us alive than dead. Have you notified Chosen command?”
“Via data stream at the same time I called you. Hold on, data is starting to come in from passive sensors.”
The Kaatan sat still and quiet, settling its orbit over a massive impact crater on the outside face of Remus. The natural energy-absorbing qualities of the crater added to the Kaatan’s stealth features to make it all but disappear. She knew they would only see her if they looked directly at her. So, the important question was, who were they, and why were they there?
As the new arrival passed by the rings of Valhalla, it presented Lilith with several good images. The design was a sleek flying cylinder, its surface only interrupted in places by weapons blisters, sensor arrays, and docking bays. The front suggested massive shield systems while the aft contained powerful drives. The T’Chillen battleships were sledgehammers, this was a delicate foil. Delicate, but deadly.
The new ship swept the system efficiently with its sensor beams, wave after wave of multi-spectral energy prodding here and there. Some reflected data back, others illuminated worlds and belts, so they were more visible to passive sensors. Nothing about the sweep spoke of subtlety.
Lilith was certain this visitor had no idea she was here. One ship killer, launched on low power, would catch it completely unaware. And in that moment, she considered destroying it. One devastatingly swift attack, and it would all be over. Once stunned it wouldn’t matter how powerful those shields were; a full spread of six sub-fusion ship killers would turn it into a glowing ball of plasma most efficiently.
Ultimately it was curiosity that stayed her hand. The ship wasn’t here for war, it presented a docile front. And it wasn’t here for stealthy reconnaissance, it was putting out enough radiation to nuke a sheep at a hundred kilometers. So, what was it doing here?
As it drifted deeper into the Bellatrix star system, Lilith consulted her files. To her surprise, the answer came quickly.
“It is a Tog ship,” Lilith announced.
“What? The Tog have ships too? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I guess it’s a language barrier. All my files are in the language of The People. Only Pip has some command of it, rudimentary as it is. He often relies on me to translate. The Tog aren’t known by that name to The People, they are the P’ing.”
“That’s interesting,” Minu said. P’ing also happened to be the name of the highest-ranking Tog they dealt with. Many humans thought of her as the leader of the species, but Minu knew she was more like a council member on a ruling board. “How long have the Tog been around?”
“As long as The People. Very old.”
“How many other species still in existence have starships?”
“I cannot say.”
“What is the Tog ship doing?”
“Just scanning.”
“Can you tell what it’s interested in?”
Lilith contemplated the myriad sensor data coming in from the ship around her, the Kaatan gently sniffing the flavor and direction of emissions from the other ship
millions of kilometers away. It was indeed focusing on a specific interest. “Initially it swept the entire star system, now it is spending a lot of time analyzing the sun.”
“Can you tell what for?”
“Not without revealing my presence.”
“Don’t do that.”
“I have no intention…not yet anyway.” Lilith didn’t say the last part of that aloud.
“Is there—”
“Just a moment,” Lilith interrupted, “the ship is changing course.” She watched as it quickly orbited Valhalla to gain a much less obscured look of Bellatrix and its two moons. “They are scanning our vicinity much more intensely.”
Down on Romulus, Minu held her breath, worried about what would happen if they detected the Kaatan in its hidden orbit. Would they attack? Would they come closer to investigate?
Much more worrisome was what Lilith would do in that situation. Regardless of her much-improved demeanor toward her fellow humans, she was still a dangerous person in her ship, which she regarded as part adoptive parent, part home, part suit of medieval armor.
“Any idea what it is looking at specifically?”
“Yes. You. The settlements on Romulus are under intense scrutiny right now.”
“The ship is changing course,” Lilith reported. “It’s heading out of the system.”
“Do you know where it’s going?”
“I will report when I return.”
“Lilith! Don’t follow that ship!”
“I thought we’d had this discussion and resolved my status long ago.”
“This is different; we don’t know about the Tog and these ships! We don’t know if they’re even piloted by Tog. Maybe some other species salvaged them.”
“Unlikely considering their very suspicious presence in your star system.”
“Regardless, you can’t risk yourself.”
“Myself, or my ship.”
“Lilith, don’t be that way.”
“I will be back.” And with that, Lilith terminated the connection.
“What happened?” Aaron asked, down on Romulus.
“She’s going after the Tog ship.”
* * *
The Kaatan came alive in a flash as soon as the Tog ship made the leap to supra-luminal travel. In seconds, full power was being channeled to propulsion. Lilith oriented the ship and shoved off the big moon’s appreciable gravity well, leaping from standing still to thousands of kilometers per second in an instant.
The ability to neutralize thousands of gravities of force while performing unbelievable maneuvers was one of the tactical advantages the Kaatan possessed. The move delivered megatons of force to the moon. Even diffused across half its surface, a series of quakes rocked the planet. This didn’t concern Lilith; the moon’s gravity well was just a means to an end. She’d analyze the orbit when she returned to be sure there was no real damage.
She subscribed a half-million-kilometer arc, clearing the wider gravity well of Bellatrix and skirting the even more massive well of Vegas. All the while, Lilith recorded sensor data at a furious pace.
As her training dictated, she was looking for any nasty surprises left behind, including detection webs, gravitic mines, high energy traces or anything indicating the ship was perhaps damaged in some way. In the five minutes since she’d boosted away from Remus, Lilith passed within a hundred thousand kilometers of where the Tog ship scanned Romulus. A few final sensor readings completed, she jumped past the light speed barrier in hot pursuit of the other ship.
There was no way to scan a ship moving faster than the speed of light. You could, however, ‘feel’ its passage or sense the massive gravity shockwave before it arrived in a system.
The latter was what made the tactical drive so dangerous. There was no shock wave; a warship just appeared next to your fleet or your world. The Kaatan would rain death on its enemies, then use the same drive to blink away, leaving its adversaries with no way to pursue or even know where the harasser had gone.
Lilith quickly realized, as the Kaatan sniffed out the path of the other ship and fell into its course, that it was quite stealthy. She’d planned to follow closely to avoid losing her quarry, but the other ship accelerated to five thousand times the speed of light in less than a minute, something she wasn’t capable of, and left an almost undetectable gravity trail.
She scoured her records on the ancient P’ing ships and found the information she was looking for. The other ship was a stealth reconnaissance frigate; not much of a combat vessel, but difficult to corner and force into a confrontation. The Kaatan was more than a match for it in battle, but not in speed and stealth.
After a day at maximum speed, she had to admit pursuit was hopeless. The trace of the other ship was almost undetectable, and if she continued, she risked having her much more noticeable gravity wave detected, which meant she had to break off pursuit. Besides, at almost thirteen light-years from Bellatrix, she was farther afield than she’d chosen to go since arriving. Giving it no further consideration, she dropped into normal space, came about, and jumped back to supra-luminal speed to return to Bellatrix. A cylindrical Tog ship watched from a light-year distant as the Kaatan turned around and headed back to Bellatrix. Its sensors tasted the nature of the other ship’s emissions and compared them to ancient records. Then, once the Kaatan was long gone, it set a new course and shot away.
* * * * *
Chapter 4
Julast 15th, 533 AE
Chosen Headquarters, Steven’s Pass, Bellatrix
“What do you mean another starship?”
Minu looked across the desk at her second-least favorite person on Bellatrix and tried to control her anger. “A starship other than the Kaatan.”
She pronounced the words with deliberate slowness, enjoying the way Jacob’s face began to turn red. Minu wore her uniform, something she hadn’t done in months. It was a calculated move, and she crossed her legs, interwove her fingers and put them over her knees. The two golden stars twinkled, reminding Jacob she was beyond his reach now in almost every way. It took the entire council to mess with a council member.
“I meant, whose ship? Another like the one up there already or one like the ones she destroyed?”
A long time ago, he’d stopped trying to refer to the Kaatan as belonging to him or the Chosen. The last time he’d tried to insist Lilith perform a mission for him, she’d left on a month long ‘research mission.’ When she returned she reminded him she was in control of the ship, and that he should remember his manners lest her next mission be at only a few hundred times the speed of light. He’d probably be an old man by the time she returned in that scenario.
“That’s the interesting part. This ship is of Tog design.”
“What?”
Minu resisted the urge to tweak Jacob’s nose yet again. “Lilith identified it as being made by the Tog around the same time as her ship was built.”
“So that makes two current species with starships?”
“Both higher-order species.”
“I wonder how many others are similarly equipped.”
“My thoughts exactly. I intend to go to Herdhome and see what I can find out.”
Jacob cradled his chin in his hand and looked at her, no doubt weighing the benefits of her doing anything useful against finding an answer. He’d buttoned her up effectively for the last six years, and not having to look at her or deal with her attitude every day was worth taking her incredible intellect and problem-solving ability off the table. But if there were other starships out there, they were potentially as dangerous, or more so than the Kaatan. He needed that information.
“Okay, that sounds like a good plan. Officially, you are still the Tog liaison to Bellatrix. We’ll write a formal request for information.” Minu smiled slightly and nodded, which was all she’d grant him for approving what she intended to do anyway. “But I want a full report.”
“Understood.”
Jacob looked like he was going to be ill. He seeme
d to be forcing himself to do something he didn’t want to do. “Gregg Larson tells me the quality of recruits he’s getting for the Rangers is better every year.”
Minu looked at him, forcing him to say what she wanted to hear.
“I admit I considered that War College of yours a complete waste of time. I appear to have been wrong. Every one of the best are your students. If not graduates from the college itself, they’ve at least been part of the RCTP your graduates set up in the local schools.”
“Thank you. The Reserve Chosen Training Program was an idea of my father’s, I just extended it to encompass a much wider spectrum of recruits when the Rangers came online.”
“Can the university function without you?”
“We’re on summer break, right now. Besides, I don’t teach day-to-day classes anymore. I mostly lecture. We’ve sent you a couple of invitations to commencements. Having the First Among the Chosen give the commencement speech would mean a lot.” But not to me, she thought.
“I will make time this year. Have your assistant, Ariana, isn’t it? Have her talk to my scheduler, and we’ll make it happen.”
“She’s having another baby, but she’ll be back by then.”
“I’m sorry about what happened to your husband. He was lucky to survive.”
“Thank you.” Minu smiled at his clumsy change of subject. “I think two successes is more than we could hope for, so I’ll get to work.” She stood and turned toward the door.
“Why do you hate me so much?”
“Because you’re an asshole, and you always have been.” Jacob’s face turned bright red. “You’ve done everything you could to hold me back from Day One. I wouldn’t be wearing two stars if I hadn’t broken every rule in the book, and even then, the council dragged you kicking and screaming to that ceremony.”
“You don’t understand everything, Chosen.”
“Then we have more in common than I thought, First.” It took a phenomenal effort of will not to slam his door with her right hand hard enough to require a work crew to get it open.
