Garth nodded. “You’ve asked me twice now.”
“And?”
“Well, yes. Of course.”
“Garth, your district will be crucial. Absolutely crucial! When Core pulls out we’ll have to rely on our own grit, our own resolve. We’ll need your fruits, vegetables, meats. The children, Garth, think of feeding our future.” Natyasha leaned forward and squeezed Garth’s hand. Her face was sincere.
“We don’t have enough food, do we?”
Natyasha wanted to snarl. Sharp, he thought. “No. Core can import it cheaper than we can grow it. Amazing, isn’t it?”
The very thought angered her. A colony, the embodiment of freedom, found it cheaper to buy food grown on Earth and send out into the stars. One more thing to keep them from being rid of Core.
Garth stifled another gag and burped beneath his free hand. “I should have stayed on shore.”
The roar resumed when the door opened. A crash of waves was followed by a roll of the yacht. A moment later a man carefully entered with both hands seeking something to hold on to. His face was shielded beneath the prospectors rain slicker. The nanite-sheathed hood kept the wind and rain out.
“Ambassador.” Natyasha stood and held out welcoming arms. “Please, sit. Do you need anything?”
The man stumbled in and gripped the edge of the window so tightly that his fingers turned white. One hand released a grip and felt for the nanite latch. Bark reached forward and snapped it down.
Garth let out a surprised sound.
“Garth, this is Ambassador Myint. From the Harmony Worlds.” Natyasha nodded to the Ambassador.
Ambassador Myint lowered the weather face-shield. Water ran down the hood onto the tip of his nose and skittered off the ran slicker. One cheek bore a metallic patch the size of a thumbprint. The same cheek patch that every Harmony Worlds citizen wore.
Natyasha looked over to Garth and watched for a reaction. Go on, she thought, let’s see how the level looks. Garth seemed to lose his composure for a moment and then captured it again. His eyes tightened and his lips pursed. She could see the fear in him.
“Dousman,” Ambassador Myint said.
“Call me Natyasha.” She leaned forward and patted Garth’s knee. “And this is Alderman Garth. He’s the answer to the agricultural problem.”
Ambassador Myint looked to Garth and smiled politely. A moment later a wave threw him off balance. Bark’s hands shot out and grabbed the Ambassadors shoulders. The Ambassador looked up at Bark nervously and sat with her assistance.
“Please Garth, do tell the ambassador about your farms. He is quite interested,” Natyasha said.
She watched as Garth stumbled on the words and then slid into his role. The moment came and passed. It pleased her that Garth fell into his place so quickly. Garth rolled into the conversation beautifully. Only an occasional retch broke his stride. Her heart settled. She gave a smile and a wink to Bark. No need to use Ms. Bark’s particular talents today, she thought.
CHAPTER FIVE
William woke to the smells of the bakeries. Scents of yeast bread and sticky sugar coaxed him out of dream.
He groaned when he saw the time. He sniffed the air, dressed, and was on the way to the mess hall.
The first sticky bun was sufficient. He licked the icing from his fingers and walked out of the mess with a second sticky bun wrapped in plastic. He thought of saving it for later but he wasn’t sure he could help himself from taking a few bites.
His reflection passed in the window. He stopped and stood before the multilayer nanite glass. He’d put on weight, enough that he noticed, and felt a bit conscious.
What am I doing? Where do I stand? The thoughts he’d laid down with and wrestled to sleep frothed back up. The sticky bun didn’t seem quite so appetizing. He didn’t relish any of the decisions or the outcomes.
On one hand, there was the oath—his oath. On the other hand, the thing he made an oath to was nudging him aside. Would they outright fire him? A pogrom against all born off Earth? He looked back up to his reflection and continued walking.
The hallways and passages were mostly still. Crews of vacuum welders and pipefitters passed through in clusters. Their eyes were arc burned and they had a salty-sweat layer from too much time in a vacuum suit. More than once William smelled the raw edge of alcohol.
A long segmented hall stretched before him in the shipyard. Stacked from wall to wall and ceiling to floor were supplies. Everything needed for human—or nanite—to assemble a starship. At regular intervals, airlocks jutted out into space. Every single one bore the red stamp of vacuum on the other side.
William stopped and stared up at a screen showing the ship on the other side. It was mostly clad in shadow, but what he could see was brutally efficient. Ugly, like a potato clad in dirt. Blisters of mass drivers stuck out. A single missile battery was half hooked up and dangling in space. He wondered if it was his, or if it mattered. They’d likely all look about the same.
“Aww fuck,” a woman’s voice said in a husky voice. She sat up slowly. A titanium flask clattered onto the floor, but she didn’t appear to care. She had every appearance of being in the Navy except for demeanor. A dull blue jacket was thrown over her shoulders.
William looked down and wasn’t quite sure whether to help her or walk away. He hadn’t noticed her when he walked up. He wasn’t even sure if she knew he was there. “Rough night?”
She looked up with eyes red and burnt looking. “Weld all day, drink all night.” She eyed up the sticky bun. “You brought me breakfast.”
William handed the sticky bun over reluctantly and turned back to the screen. The lines of the asteroid ship were growing on him, he could see a definite beauty in it. He wasn’t sure if beauty was the right word—handsome maybe. Like a woman boxer. All brute with a touch of grace.
“Fuckin’ ugly,” the woman muttered, the sticky bun half in her mouth. “Like a turnip.”
William chuckled and looked back. “Supervising?”
“Supervising? Fuck, this is my shipyard. I’m welding the damn things. You should see our schedule. Someone wants to send these pieces of shit out in a few days.” She shook her head and stuffed another bite into her mouth.
He wasn’t feeling particularly comfortable about the ship. Not that he’d felt comfortable since Admiral Dover—or was it Mr. Dover now?—told him that they had an auto-destruct sequence. The lack of trust hurt him to the core.
“How do they handle? How do they fight?”
The woman snorted and her jacket tumbled onto the floor.
William saw the rank pips and straightened himself up. On the dirty jacket were the bars of a Rear Admiral. A carbon black dot signified her as a Ships Engineer as well.
“You takin’ one out, Lieutenant?” she asked as she looked up and grabbed the flask.
“Yes, Admiral, I am.”
She smiled a crooked smile. “Then you tell me, we haven’t finished any yet.” She snapped the flask back and released it with a pop.
William stared back in disbelief. Untried. Untested. Unbelievable.
*
Admiral Hollins stood in the front of the briefing room and smiled out to the crowd without smiling at anyone in particular. His uniform was crisp, immaculate, like it was grown onto his body every morning. He looked down to his wrist and took a single deliberate step forward to the podium. The room, quiet already, dropped into silence.
The Admiral turned and looked over his shoulder for a second and watched the display bloom into a mass of stars. The display panned and slid until Earth sat at the center and lines of territory popped up. Notable planets were named. A red and orange bar marked the Harmony Worlds and the Sa’Ami.
Gray was reserved for alien space, far in the distance. The K742 and the Gracelle hung far, even in interstellar distances. That they were shown at all proved the immensity of the task.
William stood in the back of the room on sore feet. Seeing it all in one chart, so big, so close brought it ho
me. From one end to the other the combined territory was over one hundred light years. Even with the Haydn, that was a monumental distance. Good god, to protect that giant donut?
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Admiral Hollins began. He tapped the podium and the starscape changed. The Bosporus system blinked with a line bisecting that entire edge of space. “The battlespace as we know it has shifted.”
Murmurs spread throughout the crowd. William knew rumors made it out already. He’d spent agonizing hours on the way to the system answering question after question through hours of light lag. The courier gave them the basic details but they wanted the story from him, and the other dozen or so staff officers who came back with him.
“The Sa’Ami have effectively sealed off their space. They also sealed off a good deal of our border.” Admiral Hollins highlighted a handful of star systems on the display. Canaan was prominent on the list. “Over here,” he said, sweeping a hand towards Hun space, “things have gone differently.”
The display panned and zoomed. The wide border was a jagged line from the top of the wall to the floor. Icons appeared, icons for different fleet elements. The icons moved in stuttered jumps as they blinked and consolidated. A second after, more icons appeared: Hun ship icons.
Admiral Hollins’s eyes darted through the crowd and connected with those in the crowd. The icons moved and danced. “We held them at Redmond,” he muttered with a wave of his hand. “Caught them setting up a flanking base. But they hit us before our fleets could consolidate. This came in on a fast courier.”
The screen shifted closer. Icons blinked and formations of red and green clashed. William shifted where he stood and took the starscape in. The UC fleet was trapped in the midst of a border system with no name. He could see the vice snap shut when more Hun ships blinked in from behind. The battle was a running slog as the UC elements fought at every planet and gravity well. It was painful to watch as the UC fleet were almost entirely obliterated. A v-shaped wedge of the remaining ships burst a hole through the Hun line. Three frigates forged an escape and blinked from the massacre.
“We’re ceding space on both ends. The closer we are to Earth, the shorter our supply lines. The quicker we can react. The more muscle we can hammer with.” His tone grew and a confident smile appeared. “They’ll string themselves too far and we’ll have all the advantages.”
And we’ll lose a giant donut of colonies, William thought.
The display pulled back and showed the entirety of space once again. A ring appeared in space. A ring that circled through space halfway in between Earth and the outer colonies. Everything on the inside glowed green, everything on the outside was a dim yellow.
William caught his breath. They weren’t just shrinking back a few borders, but all of the borders. They didn’t have enough ships to cover everything. No, that didn’t make sense he thought, they could make ships in a month or so. What they lacked was crew. Trained crew. He looked around and saw the ranks, all lower echelon. The most experienced were either on the Sa’Ami frontier or dead on the Hun border.
His eyes searched for Farshore, the planet of his birth. It was tucked away on the far edge of space, one of the dim yellow planets. How odd, he thought, everything that happened there to force the creation of the United Colonies and they abandon it.
Whispers and murmurs rose. An angry woman called out about abandonment. William peered down and wondered where she was from. He glanced around and saw two groups: those who looked proud and those who looked lost. He assumed the men and women with eager faces were those born on Earth, or the inner colonies.
Admiral Hollins didn’t miss a beat. “The Outer Colonies will be reclaimed, but for now we need to bring our force to bear and stop them before they reach the Inner Colonies.” He cleared his face and clasped his hands behind his back. The display shifted and zoomed in on the Inner Colonies. The bright blue and white badge of the United Colonies was hovering over Earth. “This will be our finest moment. Your orders will be delivered shortly.” He turned and walked off the stage.
“Admiral!” a voice cried out. “Questions?”
Admiral Hollins stopped and turned his head to the crowd. “No questions.”
William sighed and shook his head. He couldn’t argue with the big picture, but it didn’t sit well. At every level it made perfect tactical sense. Draw them in, react quicker than they could, and use the closer supply lines. But still, he didn’t like it. He looked around and saw an opening out the door. Most of the room still looked up to the divided star map. He snuck out before the crush of officers departed. He had a ship to inspect.
*
The packet was simple. Charts followed by a manifest and the book of Standing Fleet Orders. He leaned against the rough wall and stared down at the Summary of Orders for his ship, S245998 . Simple. Almost brutally so. He was to escort a convoy to Winterthur, guard against incursions, oversee asset transfers, and return. He was, under no circumstances, to remain.
He didn’t like that part. So many mission parameters might require him to remain on station. Or was it because he knew the ship would de-assemble? He noted that it never mentioned the disassembly anywhere in the orders. Was Admiral Dover mistaken?
The threat assessment tab was particularly interesting. He was, according to the analysis, guaranteed to encounter Sa’Ami harassment drones. He’d seen them before, saw the raw damage they could inflict, and didn’t feel comfortable protecting a convoy, especially with only a handful of Marines.
The following tab laid out the capabilities of the ship. That, at least, made him feel better. The quad batteries of mass drivers were specifically designed to intercept missile launches while the rear mounted missile launcher was specifically to kill Sa’Ami drones. The ship relied on mass and sheer bulk to react to incoming railgun slugs. A pincushion, he thought, a railgun pincushion.
The one thing he didn’t like was he only had one railgun. They were accurate, powerful, and helped a small ship hit above its weight class. He understood the problems: at long ranges, the projectiles could be avoided while at short ranges a mass driver could do it better. But still, he liked that big bore nickel slug. If only they could get it to fire a smart projectile.
William walked slowly and studied the crew. They stood in ranks at the edge of the airlock. His crew. He came closer and tried to do an approximation of what he thought a Captain should do. On the front edge stood Huron and Lieutenant Shay. Beyond them stood the remainder of the crew, looking crisp and eager. He wondered who they were, but more importantly what they were made of.
The red light over the hatch burned brightly. The display next to it showed an array of arcs burning brightly on the edges of the hull. A cold alkaline light shone over the bulk of the hull. His hull. His ship. The very thought gave him goosebumps. A fresh from the yard beautiful... potato. He still couldn’t get the first picture out of his head. It’ll need a better name than that, he thought.
“Mr. Huron,” William said.
“Captain,” Huron replied.
“What’s the status, Lieutenant?” William asked.
Shay cleared her throat and shifted her stance. “Admiral Muir told us to wait.”
“Tall Admiral? Skinny? Hungover?”
Lieutenant Shay chuckled and raised her eyebrows. “Uh, yes, sir.”
William smiled. She owed him a pastry. He turned to the rest of the crew. A bit of everything. Light skin, dark skin, men and women. Technical ranks, naval ratings, and just the bare basics to make a ship function. Were they enough?
“Marines, Ms. Shay?” William asked.
She shook her head, then snapped her eyes down the hall behind William. “They might be ours, Captain.”
William turned and placed his hands on his hips. Three Marines were walking in single file with complete combat baggage on their backs. The uniforms were crisp and gray. The lead was a woman, in her mid-twenties with a face like a granite wall. Her arms were thrust out to the side and they swung as she walked.
<
br /> “Cruisin’ for a bruisin’,” Huron muttered.
William couldn’t help but smile. The other two were almost like twins. Dark hair like burnt coffee and wide faces. Large wasn’t quite enough of a word to describe them. They looked like a pair of lost lumberjacks, or stonemasons. Abraham, his Anabaptist friend, flashed into his mind.
“Group, halt!” The Corporal’s eyes swung slowly and locked onto William. “Group, reporting for duty.”
“At ease, Corporal, fall in.”
There was an ease, a gracefulness, all with an overtone of extreme violence. Her face was a mass of scars, or what remained of scars after nanites smoothed it out. It must’ve been bad, he thought, for the nanites to not remove it all. As she turned her eyes flickered red, nanite implants. William looked down to his tablet: Corporal Vale Thorisdottir.
“Open ‘er up, Harry,” Admiral Muir said. She approached William and sized him up. “She’ll be done, or soon enough. We’ll have another day to finish it up, but you can start loading now.”
William nodded. The Admiral didn’t look much better than before, just more awake. And sober. “I think you owe me a pastry, Admiral.”
Admiral Muir turned and cocked her head slightly with a wide smile on her face. “Ahh, I thought you looked familiar. That was a good start to a bad day.” She looked satisfied as she turned to the hatch. A chubby civilian engineer walked over to the airlock and plugged in an oversized tablet. A dim hissing pulsed and surged from a panel next to the door. Chilled steam flowed from beneath the panel. Breathable atmosphere was pouring into the little ship for the first time.
“She gonna hold, Harry?” Admiral Muir asked.
Harry shrugged and stood with the tablet cradled in his arms. The light above the airlock flickered to yellow and then green. Williams heart raced faster. He stole a glance at Huron and Shay: both looked as excited as he was. He was almost leaning forward, eager to get in. There it was, just on the other side, waiting.
“Aww fuck,” Harry spat. “Popped a weld.”
William felt as deflated as the ship. The airlock light danced back down to red once again. He looked over to Admiral Muir with a questioning glance. She shrugged and sighed. “Why don’t you guys go get something to eat?”
Edge of Redemption (A Star Too Far Book 3) Page 4
