Etude to War (Earth Song Cycle Book 4)

by Mark Wandrey

  Minu,

  I knew you could do it. You have never been one to let anything stand in your way. I have no way of knowing how long it took you to get to this point. You have all my entries now, and I can’t give you anything more. I know you will figure out what I’ve been up to after you read them all and do some investigating. I also know you’re probably pissed after all the running around I made you do in lieu of explaining everything. Even now, I can’t risk anyone else getting this message by mistake, whether it’s an incredibly gifted hacker or an accident of the ghost in the machine. It doesn’t matter. I’ve given you the tools you need. Good luck.

  Father

  “Well that sucks,” Aaron said beside her.

  “That’s my father,” she said, not feeling mad, just empty. She turned to Pip. “What’s the story with the rod?”

  “It was your father’s personal PCR. It shows every Portal he dialed over several years.” He glanced at the tablet with the copies of her father’s diaries. “I guess you have to put the two together.”

  “That must be what he meant by the tools,” Minu said.

  “He didn’t make it easy,” Pip said, gesturing at the script floating over the PCR “They’re Concordian codes. Without entering our references, I don’t know what worlds these are.”

  Minu pointed at the last one on the list. “We’ll have to backtrack one at a time. We have to get to a Portal.”

  “What about the ships?” Kal’at asked, the first thing he’d said since following them to the landing bay. “We may have enough power aboard to bring them to life.”

  “We’ll come back after we chase a few of these Portal addresses,” she said. Everyone nodded. They were here for her, what would a few days or weeks matter? “Lilith, can you get us to the closest world with a Portal?”

  * * *

  As they accelerated above the speed of light once more, Minu lay on the bunk in her cabin and paged through her father’s diaries. She had access to many thousands of pages, thoughts and insights by the man who had helped raise her. She read a section about what he saw on a junkpile, interesting information that conflicted with evidence from other junkpiles. She saw an image taken from a dead colony world of their Portal. It all seemed disjointed to her. What was her father getting at? Where did this all lead?

  Aaron came in quietly, fresh from finishing a shift in the CIC. He undressed and slid under the sheets behind Minu, gently kissing her on the neck and slipping an arm around her waist. She smiled and set the tablet on the little stand next to the bed before rolling over. His strong arms encircled her, and she purred at the safety she felt. He wasn’t just holding her; he was holding his new baby as well.

  “Find anything interesting?” he asked.

  “Let me look,” she replied, her hands going under the sheets.

  In a few minutes, he’d completely forgotten the question, but she hadn’t. Even as she gasped in pleasure and clung to him, she didn’t forget. One way or another, it was all coming to an end.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 4

  April 27th, 534 AE (subjective)

  Planet Richter, Galactic Frontier

  Minu glanced back at the shuttle and hoped it would be okay. They had elected to take one of the Kaatan’s shuttles instead of the Phoenix because it was somewhat more robust, and Lilith could control it if she needed to. She shouldered her pack and turned to look at Aaron. The ground under them heaved and a deep groan reverberated through the air.

  “Shit,” she growled and dropped to one knee. A few meters ahead Aaron did the same. The four Rasa soldiers widened their stances and crouched slightly. They were only a little over a meter tall and more naturally sure-footed than humans.

  The ground bucked and heaved for almost a minute. Behind them the shuttle’s pneumatic landing gear hissed and jerked, keeping the shuttle almost perfectly level. Finally, the earthquake, or Richter quake on this world, began to subside, and the two humans stood. Behind them, the shuttle seemed no worse for wear.

  “Everything okay?” Lilith asked Minu through her implant.

  “Fine,” Minu assured her. “That was a nice little shock.”

  “Six point nine by your scale.”

  “What if the next one is worse? Can the shuttle handle it?”

  “The shuttle can handle up to an eight. Should anything worse happen, I will lift it off remotely and hover through the quake. I can quickly come and get you, should it be required.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  Minu settled her pack, slung the shock rifle over her other shoulder, and nodded to the others. The ceramic concrete road had cracks and fissures in a thousand places. The roadway had been a major thoroughfare eons earlier. Now it was only recognizable as a road due to the lack of plant growth. The durable special concrete was supposed to last forever, but constant quakes had turned the roadbed into something closely resembling gravel. It was still deep enough though that plants couldn’t grow through it.

  The city center was several kilometers away. It looked about like the roadway. Few buildings were more than a shadow of their original structures. Some smaller buildings were mostly intact, but anything over a few stories tall had long suffered failures of one sort or another. Some leaned against others, while some had disintegrated or fallen across the roadway.

  They were lucky the world Lilith found was not too far from the derelict fleet and had been scouted by Chosen. They’d considered it useless and too dangerous for any detailed salvage, but her files held a map which included the location of the Portal in relation to some of the world’s landmarks.

  They’d done a circuit of the city, the only surviving one on an accessible landmass, until she’d fixed the landmarks and had them linked to Lilith in orbit. They might have to alter their course a few times, but they’d get there. Leaving the shuttle at the edge of the city was insurance that a building wouldn’t fall on it while they were gone. Lilith valued every part of her ship.

  As she walked next to Aaron, she fought a moment of nausea. Every morning, she woke and raced for the bathroom in their tiny cabin aboard the Kaatan, although it seemed the morning sickness has been less extreme the last few days. She continued to handle it the same way she did the first time, with a mild medication and a brisk workout.

  She didn’t know if either helped, but she was regaining her tone. She’d noticed in the mirror that morning that her muscles were once again showing through her tummy’s taut skin, just in time for her to get all fat with a baby inside, she thought, then smiled. A life was growing inside her.

  “You awake?” Aaron’s voice snapped her back to the present, and she silently admonished herself for not paying attention on an alien world. She’d taught thousands of recruits that daydreaming was the quickest way to become a statistic, yet here she was doing it herself.

  “Sorry, a little preoccupied.”

  “Thinking about little Aaron junior?”

  “Sure it’s a boy, are you?” She smiled, glad he was as interested as he seemed to be. They’d both become parents the hard way with Lilith. And though they’d stumbled now and then, and Lilith only allowed them to be her parents up to a point, it was still a relationship they had grown to cherish.

  Lilith seemed to be as excited as any of them about becoming a sister. Minu knew she was watching the area within five hundred kilometers overhead, ready to rain death on anyone or anything that dared to challenge her family. It was that side of her that scared Minu the most. She could be as merciless as the situation called for; emotions didn’t enter into the equation. But as the years went by, some normal, human emotions were beginning to manifest. And that could be just as dangerous as the lack of them.

  “First a girl, next a boy,” Aaron continued the banter without missing a beat.

  They both carried their shock rifles cross-body, harnesses clipped to the mid-stock point and hooked on right shoulders. It would only take a second to raise the weapons to the ready. Aaron kept his eyes moving, looking for a
ny place where an ambush might occur, or a trap might be set.

  Three of the Rasa also carried shock rifles, and one a beamcaster. Everyone sported Enforcers as sidearms. The reptiles had a newer model with a somewhat smaller cartridge. They didn’t have the humans’ forearm muscles and found the original 15mm rounds too robust. Theirs employed a 12mm bullet. It wasn’t as devastating, but it was still incredibly powerful at close range.

  The Rasa weren’t sure how to handle Minu’s pregnancy. As an egg-laying species, they carefully protected their progeny until hatched, at which point they steadfastly ignored them and allowed them to run feral. The young stayed close to their parents by instinct, fending for themselves and occasionally preying on each other until turning about five years old. Then they bonded with a mature adult and began their education and civilization. They considered the humans’ reproductive process rather time-consuming and disgusting.

  “What if it’s a girl?” she asked.

  Aaron pretended to examine a rare, surviving five-story building through his rifle scope. They all wore advanced contact lenses, built by the Kaatan, which allowed them to view images from their rifle scopes without having to bring them to their shoulders, so she knew he was delaying.

  “It worries me,” he said finally. Minu glanced at him and saw his eyes shining when he looked away.

  “Why?”

  “Because girls in your family seem destined for greatness.”

  “And why is that a problem?”

  “I want our next child to be normal. You know?”

  Minu thought for a few steps, then nodded her head. She knew only too well. During her time teaching at the University of Plateau then founding the War College, she’d felt almost normal. She’d wondered more than once how a common life would have been if she’d gone to school instead of the Trials. Maybe she’d have a big family now with a bunch of kids running around. Some might even be as old as Lilith, without all the negative aspects of her life. Normal.

  Then she looked at where she was, walking along a crumbling roadway on an alien world almost a thousand light-years from the world she’d been born on. She was one of the elite Chosen who served humanity. In her career she’d fought for her people many times and found invaluable treasures and advanced science that had saved innumerable lives.

  “Boy or girl, it will be our child,” was all she could say.

  Aaron glanced at her and nodded. There wasn’t anything more to say. He knew the power of the family he’d married into. The Groves had never been anything more than mildly successful at business, and he was the first to serve as Chosen. The quiet undertone of Groves Industries’ success had always been the steady presence of Minu Groves.

  Years earlier, he and her three closest friends had seen something in her and decided to place her in charge. Cherise once said that someone had to lead, and she had known it would be Minu from the first time she set eyes on her. She knew the red-headed girl with the dangerously flashing green eyes would be a force to be reckoned with.

  Now Minu and Aaron were having another child. The die had been cast, and there was no going back.

  * * *

  Like any of a hundred worlds she’d visited, the Portal was in what had once been the town center. Even on planets with populations in the hundreds of millions, the Portal spire was always in the center of the largest city. Minu guessed the population of this town was maybe a hundred thousand beings, plus or minus. It was far too small for a spire.

  Like always, she tried to guess what the beings who’d lived there had been like. Had they been a peaceful people who farmed the land, built well-designed machines, raised their children, and hoped for a bright future? Or were they a warlike species who dreamed of conquest? What fate had become them?

  Perhaps it was the seismic upheaval of the planet that made it uninhabitable. But she’d seen much less hospitable places where people still lived. The Traaga would probably consider this place a paradise. Maybe the Squeen were living on a world like this one, where no one would think to look for them. Concordian technology had tamed far worse.

  The six of them broke into three teams of two. Aaron and Minu were a team, and the Rasa split to create two more.

  One pair of the dexterous reptilians skittered up the remains of a building to set up a sniper’s nest. With so few buildings over one story remaining, they had a nearly perfect field of fire surrounding the town square.

  The second team of Rasa quickly circled the square, visually searching for listening posts. Many species routinely left behind recording devices to see who was visiting what planet. They placed their equipment near the Portals. It was also SOP for most species to hunt and destroy each other’s listening posts.

  “All clear on lookout, Boss,” hissed the Rasa over her communicator.

  Minu shook her head. Even the Rasa were calling her ‘Boss’ now. At least it wasn’t ‘Commodore!’

  “No signs of monitoring devices,” the other team reported.

  Minu glanced at Aaron on the other side of the alley where they were hiding within sight of the Portal. As always, it came down to someone exposing themselves in these sorts of situations, and she was never one to let anyone else take the risk.

  She unclipped her shock rifle, cradled it in the crook of her left arm, and stood up. Aaron was less than a step behind. They moved quickly but didn’t run, knowing that sure movements were more effective than a dead run. They needed to be within ten meters of a Portal for the PCR to link with it. She’d wondered a lot over the years at the wisdom of that decision.

  They reached the Portal and knelt on the dais. The arch popped open, glistening in the midday sun. Aaron took up a position next to her, his weapon ready and eyes searching as she took out the PCR and brought it to life.

  A moment later, the Portal blinked twice in response, and the two devices linked. Script appeared above the rod, and she began to sort the data.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 5

  April 28th, 534 AE (subjective)

  Planet Richter, Geosynchronous Orbit, Galactic Frontier

  Pip stared at the screens of data floating before him with what he’d come to think of as his first level of consciousness. He still remembered the old days, before a Rasa accelerator had torn a chunk from his brain, when that was the only level he possessed. Now he possessed three levels of operational consciousness and another two unconscious levels.

  The computers implanted in his brain by the Kaatan Medical Intelligence had successfully reconstructed his higher faculties, but he’d paid a price. He secretly suspected he wasn’t conscious at all; he was more of an echo of who Pipson Leata once was. He had all the memories (or most of them), all the knowledge, and certainly all the creativity that was once Pip, but he lacked the passion.

  Years earlier, he’d been in love, twice. First with Minu, when he was still young and didn’t know what he really wanted. That still burned secretly within him when he fell in love with the woman that would become his wife.

  Cynthia was as different from Minu as a woman could be. She was meek, quiet, completely lacking in self-confidence, and completely smitten that a Chosen would be interested in her, even if that Chosen was a rather small one who was trying desperately to hide his Rusk heritage.

  The relationship grew slowly, almost surprising them. They began going to movies on days off and out for occasional dinners, then on a short camping trip one weekend. They’d held hands, kissed, then touched tentatively a few times. Even as inexperienced as Pip was, he always knew the next step. Then the Rasa vendetta came, and he nearly died.

  He only possessed haunted memories of the years that passed after his injury. Ages passed in his trapped consciousness. He was unable to understand why he couldn’t wake up, trapped with his own thoughts and his own regrets.

  He awoke with nothing but those years of self-hating regret to anchor him. Minu and most of his friends had risked everything to go out into the deep unknown and bring him back, but he’d never
been able to truly thank them for that.

  Pip never understood that part of himself. He liked to justify it by weighing his accomplishments against the price they’d paid to bring him back. It was the same part that married Cynthia, even though he felt almost nothing for her. It was that part which had used her for every sexual adventure he could imagine or read about. It had let her get pregnant when she wanted to. And it was that part which finally left when it all became too much. He had never wanted any of it anyway.

  So, he spent more time aboard the Kaatan than anywhere else. He didn’t have to be aboard to link with the ship’s computers; it was just easier to be away from the annoying distractions that were people. He took care of his carnal needs during intermittent trips back to the surface. Other than that, the only person he interacted with daily was Lilith. He considered her more like him than the rest of the noisy, bothersome, irrational human race.

  Various levels of his consciousness worked on different tasks twenty-three hours a day. He had to disengage his first level of consciousness from time to time for a few hours. Most people called it sleep. To Pip it was more like a chance to empty his memory buffers. He could work on problems so quickly, his brain’s computer eventually filled up, and he started to fog over. He could simply work on fewer things, but that was boring.

  He knew his buffers were stuffed, and his attention was starting to waver. But he didn’t want any down time. With Minu and Aaron off the ship, he didn’t have to listen to their husband, wife, boss klothshit, and that suited him just fine. It was bad luck that their ‘away mission’ corresponded with the time when he was finally running out of space to operate. Of course, that was when inspiration struck.