Alpha Fleet (Rebel Fleet Series Book 3)

by B. V. Larson

  “Proud of yourself, are you?”

  “Yeah… I guess I am,” I admitted.

  He sighed. “All right, I’m Godwin. Now, either shoot me, or give me that circlet.”

  Lifting the item in question, I tossed it into the air, letting it spin for a second before snatching it back again.

  “This little thing, huh?” I asked. “That’s what this is all about?”

  “No, not at all. This about war, revenge, extinction and glory—but I need that right now, Blake.”

  “My first question is: why do you need it so badly?”

  He glanced at the girl, looking pained.

  “She won’t tell anyone,” I said. “Will you, Miss?”

  “Doctor,” she corrected. “I’m Dr. Theresa Williams—but sure, I can keep quiet.”

  Godwin laughed. “She’s a scientist. A xenobiologist who’d love to dissect me, if I don’t miss my guess.”

  “Well…” she said, “you do keep fading away into a puddle of spit. It’s very frustrating.”

  “Are you going to answer the question or not, Godwin?”

  “Not with her standing there rubbing that weapon so eagerly.”

  I glanced at her, and I took the pen-like device from her fingers again.

  “Outside,” I told her. “Go try to find the real Abrams.” I glanced at Godwin. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

  “I should have… but no. You need him to form rifts, remember?”

  Theresa left reluctantly.

  “Right…” I said. “She’s gone, so you can start talking.”

  He hesitated. “Why don’t you just shoot me again?”

  “Because you’ll come back as someone else. You can’t get off this ship, can you? We were right about that.”

  “Yes… There’s no reference point. I need to die with the circlet on AND fade away with it. That’s all. You removed it before it could leave this squalid sector of the galaxy along with my body. If you allow me to complete the process, I can go home. My consciousness will be broadcast and this mission will have ended.”

  I nodded slowly. “You’ve been popping up all over my ship. How can you do that? How can you form a body out of thin air?”

  “I don’t,” he said. “It’s just tech. If you showed a TV set to a primitive, it would be a magic box, right? It’s the same thing here.”

  I wasn’t satisfied. I shook my head. “So evasive—even now. What’s the point? If you’re so far advanced, you can tell me what you’re doing. It’s not like we could easily figure it out and copy your tech.”

  Godwin shifted uncomfortably. “It’s not that. You might be able to interfere with the process if you knew more about it. That’s why I’m reluctant to discuss it. Consider: we’re talking about my very existence.”

  Thinking that over, I decided to let it go. He might have built a device and hidden it somewhere in the ship. Or, it might be that the circlet allowed him to reform in a localized area—he had said something about an anchor… Or, he might even have an accomplice aboard. I might be dealing with a team of Nomads under deep cover.

  Whatever the case, I could understand why he was willing to die to protect a secret that was so critical to him. Since we didn’t have that much time before we were going to come out of hyperspace, I decided to let it go.

  “Okay,” I said, “we’ll drop that one. What are you trying to do?”

  “Get off your ship. My mission has been accomplished.”

  That pissed me off. I frowned at him. “You mean because you managed to wreck a squadron of Imperial ships and embroil Earth in a fresh war?”

  He snorted. “It’s more than that. You’ll be blamed for genocide.”

  I froze for a second. “All those gravity drones didn’t double back against the phase-ships? Or follow us into the rift?”

  He shook his head slowly. “No. Most of them continued on. Think about how that sequence of events looked from a distance. You came in with a swarm of bombs trailing you. Using them cleverly, you destroyed the defending fleet, then fled. Behind you, traveling in your deadly wake, a cloud of death homed in. Diva is gone—but the way the planet died was recorded and transmitted by countless sensory devices.”

  Nodding, I began to pace the deck. “I get it. You’ve been playing Earth all along. Making mysterious visitations, sizing us up, figuring out an angle and a plot… but you’ve got to know that the Imperials know who their real enemy is. They’ll blame the Nomads, not Earth.”

  The strange amalgam of Abrams and Godwin shook its eerie head.

  “Yes and no,” he said. “They’ll know we were involved, but they’ll also know you were my ally.”

  “What the hell is the point, then?” I demanded. “Why drag Earth into this? You could have done the same thing without me at all.”

  “There are details,” he said. “For one thing, all starships leave traces where they’ve been. Signatures that can be tracked down to the builder’s star system. Did you know that the source material for a nuclear bomb can be identified after it has gone off? Even you Earthers have mastered that process. You can tell from particulate matter what nation manufactured a given weapon and trace it back to them. So, you see the problem? We didn’t want anyone tracing anything to our home cluster.”

  “You came to Earth, helped us build a starship, and then you used that starship to deliver this attack without giving the enemy any way to trace it back to you.”

  “Oh, they’ll try,” he said conversationally. “After Earth’s been reduced to a floating cinder, they’ll search for signatures. I doubt they’ll find anything useful, however. We were very thorough.”

  I thought about the lonely spot in deep interplanetary space that was chosen for the trap. Clearly, they’d tried to do their dirty deeds in an area so remote not even the best forensics crew could figure it out. On top of that, the gravity drones had gone off—doubtlessly obscuring any tracks that had been left behind by the Nomad ship which had dropped them off in the first place.

  “Used…” I said, “Earth has been used again.”

  “Of course,” Godwin said. “Did you honestly expect anything else? Think of yourself as a tribe on an island. A primitive people who’ve only just been introduced to the rest of the universe. You’re not much good to anyone—other than as pawns. That’s how these meetings between civilizations always go, even in your own history.”

  Heaving a sigh, I straightened up. “All right then. You’ve answered my questions. For that, I thank you. As to the rest of it…”

  Breaking off, I stepped up to him, slammed the circlet on his head, and shot him with the beam.

  It was a tight, hot laser. Stabbing and burning through his left eye socket and into his brain, I was pleased to see his ephemeral body could feel pain. Far from an easy death, I got to watch him writhe, shiver, piss himself and die shaking on the floor.

  The entire time, I kept that beam cooking. I had to drop the beamer in the end, though, as it had become too hot and burned my hand.

  “Until we meet again, Godwin,” I said to the corpse.

  This time, when the body melted away, the circlet melted with it. Soon there was no sign he’d ever graced our ship, other than a stain of clear sticky liquid.

  Abrams was located about an hour later. Theresa herself found him in a storage locker filled with waste-baggies and one pissed-off scientist. For many hours afterward, Abrams and his pack of followers searched every inch of the ship, but they never found the circlet, Godwin, or any other trace of our friend, the Nomad.

  =46=

  The hyperspace journey was still going on six hours later, and that by itself was frightening. We could be going anywhere—or nowhere at all. Not even Abrams dared to guess where we would come out.

  “We were surrounded by gravity-drones when we launched,” he said in an accusatory tone, “and you didn’t even give the navigational people time to lock onto a beacon star.”

  I shrugged. “Would you rather be dead?” I demanded,
my eyes sweeping a resentful group of officers. “That was the other option. We could have driven our ship right into Diva with a pack of gravity-drones riding with us, or maybe we could have fought it out with a dozen phase-ships and died that way.”

  For a moment they were quiet, but it didn’t last long.

  “You could have let the drones destroy the phase-ships,” Dr. Abrams suggested. “We might have lived through the blast… After regaining control of the helm, we could have left the swarm at will, creating a rift without interference.”

  Glowering at him, I shrugged again. He was the ultimate backseat driver.

  “We might have lived—but when we get out of this hyper-spatial tube, we might live through that, too. It was risky either way.”

  Abrams pouted, but he shut up.

  “All right then,” I said. “What’s done is done. I need status reports on our repair efforts.”

  Samson chimed in next. Support systems and defensive armament were his forté. Some of the other officers complained he didn’t have enough formal engineering training, but he’d pulled me out of grim circumstances many times, and I liked having him around.

  “We’ve got full helm controls again. The starboard drive is at seventy percent. I doubt we can fix that before hitting home base. Our shield generators are operating again—but they’re weaker. We’ve lost some aft power cells. The phase-ships did a number on our stern, and some of those sections are still airless and open to space.”

  He displayed some scenes. The aft chambers crawled with suited spacers. They were patching the small holes and welding big plates over the gaping ones. Beyond their glowing faceplates, I could see a backdrop of swirling light. It was hyperspace.

  “There’s a lot of radiation out there,” Commander Hagen said. “Those men are too exposed.”

  “We’re monitoring each man’s dose of rads,” Samson said. “When they hit their monthly limit, we take them out and switch in a fresh spacer.”

  Hagen looked less than satisfied. “How long does it take them to hit that?”

  Samson shrugged. “Twenty… maybe thirty minutes.”

  Hagen laughed ruefully. “Good thing we’ve got a big crew. Is medical smart enough to be shooting them up with potassium iodide?”

  Samson assured them the crewmen were being cared for, and we moved on.

  “Dr. Abrams,” I said, turning to him, “Godwin got away, right?”

  “As far as we can tell,” he said. “I’ve taken the liberty of reprogramming the ship’s AI to stop hiding Nomads in the future. Instead, it will now give our key personnel a private message warning us that a duplicate crewmember is aboard.”

  “We should have had that software working all along. Have you tested it?”

  “It’s still a work in progress,” he admitted.

  “Great… what about navigational questions? Any clue where we’re headed?”

  He threw his hands in the air. “I’ve been working on the Godwin problem, but in my opinion our destination is unknowable anyway. You didn’t follow any procedures when you opened this rift.”

  “As you keep pointing out… but we have to come out somewhere, don’t we?”

  Dr. Abrams squirmed a little. “Maybe…” he said.

  Frowning, I turned fully to face him. “What do you mean, ‘maybe’?”

  “Just as I said. The odds are this hyper-spatial tube has an endpoint within our local region of the galaxy… however…”

  “What? Spell it out.”

  “Theoretically, a wormhole can terminate anywhere within the known universe. That’s quite a big domain mathematically. If we, for example, are on our way to a distant galaxy several million lightyears away, it could take us a period greater than our natural lifespans to reach the endpoint.”

  We all stared at him in shock. No one said anything. Usually, I could put a bright face on just about any bad news—but this one had me stumped.

  “Uh…” I said. “That’s why you wanted me to take plan B, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said firmly.

  “I don’t recall hearing any talk of this circumstance back in our astronavigation courses. I had no idea a blind jump might really be so dangerous…”

  “Of course you didn’t hear of this option,” he snapped. “It’s always assumed crews will follow directives. Many other suicidal acts were similarly not covered, such as flying your ship into a star, or—”

  “That’s enough,” I said. That, along with a fierce glare, shut him down. “Well then, we’ll make the best of it. Hagen, rotate the watches as usual, but work in an extra shift of trainees to give our core bridge teams a break.”

  “Will do.”

  We adjourned, and I headed for my quarters with a lot on my mind. Mia was there, waiting for me. She hadn’t been in the command meeting, so she was bright-eyed and upbeat.

  “When do we get home?” she asked.

  “Soon, I hope.”

  “Good. When we do, I don’t want to go on another trip until we’re forced to. No more volunteering yourself, Leo! Let’s just hang around in space waiting for Fex... On second thought, even that will be tiresome. Do you think we can arrange a few days of shore leave?”

  “Um… sure,” I told her, giving her a wan smile.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing!” I lied. “It’s just been a long, long day.”

  She looked me over curiously. I could tell she was trying to figure out what was going on. She immediately leapt to the wrong conclusion.

  “I know what it is,” she said, creeping behind me and putting hands on my shoulders. “You’re sad about that Sarah-person. You expected her to move into our bed, didn’t you?”

  “Uh…”

  “Well, she must have rejected the offer. When I saw her at the gym, she showed me her longest finger… strange. I didn’t think she’d refuse to become your second-girl. After all, you are the captain.”

  “That’s not exactly—”

  “No, no,” she said, shushing me. “It’s very sweet. I told you how I felt, and you chose to keep me over a new girl. That’s a compliment. It’s her loss and my gain. Now, I’d like to make it up to you.”

  “Yeah?”

  At first, I wasn’t positive what she meant. But then she started to pull off her clothes and mine.

  There are a lot of things I don’t know about women, but one of them I do understand is that when they’re in the mood, you seize the opportunity—and you keep your damned mouth shut.

  =47=

  We came out of hyperspace nine days later. By that time, some of us had given up on surviving the experience.

  The rift opened, big and green-white this time. To me, it looked brighter than they usually did, but that could have been an illusion.

  It turned out that it wasn’t.

  “We’re passing through, Captain.”

  “All hands to battle stations,” I ordered. “We don’t know what we’ll encounter. Hold on for the transfer into normal space.”

  My eyes squinched up tightly when we broke out of the hyper-spatial tube. It was one thing to be targeting a given system, only to find yourself lightyears off-target. It was quite a different experience to come in cold—completely uncertain where you were about to emerge.

  We broke through and immediately began scanning our environment but within seconds we knew something was wrong.

  The ship slewed and my crew all fell against the port side of the hull. Many were strapped in, but those moving around were thrown off their feet and slammed into the walls.

  “Get everyone to a seat!” I ordered. “Samson, flip on the anti-gravity, man!”

  “Sir—it is on. We’re in a strong gravitational pull.”

  “Source?”

  The crew worked, and the computer began drawing out our surroundings.

  The image on the holoprojector looked strange. We were in a body of moving debris, gas clouds, matter, radiation and violently released energies blurred everything around u
s.

  “Our sensors aren’t working,” Chang said. He was at a loss.

  “Dalton, assume we’re crashing into a gas giant. Use the pull to our port side as a point of reference and turn our jets against it.”

  “Working on it, Captain.”

  I could tell he was already fighting the controls. Over the last week he’d made a good recovery after his vicious combat with Godwin. We heeled over and the deck was the deck again.

  People slid around again as we slewed into our new orientation. A few victims had been knocked senseless, and they flopped like ragdolls over the hull onto the deck.

  “Dr. Abrams? Do you hear me? I need an evaluation of our status.”

  There was about a seven second delay, and then he finally spoke. “We’re in a strong gravitational field. Our anti-gravity systems are unable to overcome it.”

  “How strong?” I asked. “Are we near a planet or a star?”

  “Neither,” he said, “if this kind of power was being exerted by a star, we’d have burned up by now. If it was a planet—well, no planet can pull this hard. Anything of sufficient mass would have lit up due to internal fusion and begun burning by now.”

  “All right then, give me a theory.”

  Abrams hesitated. “Captain, I believe it’s a singularity.”

  My mind froze over. For some reason, I hadn’t considered such a grim possibility.

  “You mean a black hole?”

  “Yes, that’s the colloquial term.”

  “Can we escape? Are we near the event horizon?”

  “I’m still analyzing. I’ll get back to you the moment I have an answer.”

  “That’s very helpful. In the meantime, what do we do?”

  He hesitated again. “We could form another rift. A blind-jump due to the interference.”

  “Set it up. We might have to try it.”

  The connection closed, and I looked around my bridge numbly. We were all going to die. It was just a matter of time.

  “Captain?” Chang asked. “I’m getting a signal. A faint signal.”

  “What are you talking about?”