The Otherworld Rebellion (War of Alien Aggression #9)

by A. D. Bloom

  The Otherworld Rebellion

  by A.D. Bloom

  ©2016

  The author would like to express his appreciation to the USS Nautilus (SSN-571), USS Massachusetts (BB-59), Evan C., /r/WarshipPorn, /r/ImaginaryWarships, World of Warships...Blue Scar D, wo bist du? So MANY ninjas.

  The Otherworld Rebellion

  Table of Contents

  01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, Epilogue

  2187: The war between Earth-allied worlds and the puppets of the Ortani Imperium has continued without significant pause since 2164. Twenty-one years have passed since Humans and Shediri began to populate Otherworld, third planet of the Alcyone system. Earth's largest settlement, penal colony, and source of military contractors now verges on open rebellion.

  1

  New Madras, Otherworld

  Alcyone System, 129 parsecs from Earth

  The Shediri warrior monks buried Ram Devlin outside the city walls. For what felt like days, he stared into the dark using only his exosuit's rebreather and listened to the distant rumble as Staas Company Security searched New Madras for him once more, knocking down the fast-printed doors of the veterans' quarter.

  Once the Staas Guard had gone, he finally heard the shovels spade the dirt above him and they raised Ram up again. He squinted in the light, barely able to see the lines of the city for all the clouds of dust the company goons had kicked up in knocking down unregistered structures.

  Chun Ye Men cleaned the last of the alien earth off Ram's suit with brisk fore and backhanded slaps. Dana Sellis steadied him as he popped the latches, took off his helmet, and sucked in the fresh air.

  "They've gone on to Chiva," said Chun. "They think you're at the Legion barracks there."

  "How'd they get that idea?"

  "Someone lied," said Dana.

  "How bad was it this time?"

  "The usual. They pushed hard, tempers flared, and the company broke bones. Arrests and pointless interrogations followed. The stills were destroyed of course. And they found my sardines," said Chun.

  "I'm glad it wasn't worse."

  Chun looked at him as if he'd finally lost his mind. "Do you know what the Shediri will pay for a can of sardines from Earth? They say the flavor actually intoxicates them. 240 cans would have got us a few dozen Shediri torpedoes in trade. Full-size fusion warhead, too, not those warspits...those baby-bang versions of our Mk5 warspites..."

  "We won't need torpedoes for this run behind the lines."

  Dana said, "The day is coming, Ram. We're going to need them."

  "Get me out of the city and into orbit. Hank and I will get you something you can trade the bugs for their torpedoes."

  ICV Absolom

  Epsilon Vega, the Long Front

  Devlin's Privateers steamed across the systems of the Long Front. No matter how many enemy ships foundered under their railguns and torpedoes, the UNS and Staas Company hunted privateers without letters of marque as if they were pirates. Absolom, Split Aces, Totoro, Hotjacket and the chitin-hulled Ketok and IIsto rode Shediri-made quiet-drive coils and shrouded themselves with energy shunts, traveling stealthed whenever ships passed near. They slipped past the UNS and the Earth-allied forces of the Shediri, the Ekkai, and the Welk on their way to Xihute territory.

  They traversed the debris fields and graveyards of the two-decade war where the lanes between the interstellar transits were full of ruined machines and the dead of both sides. Not many aboard the bridge of Absolom or her flotilla had seen the two-year battle at Sirius during the first years of the war, but Ram Devlin had. To his eye, this endless stalemate, this war of attrition they fought with the Imperium now looked much the same only many times larger.

  When it came time to transit, instead of breaching space and revealing themselves, they chanced passage in the blind wake of the 800-meter battleship Westmoreland as the UNS vessel opened and rode the interstellar transit to Alpha Eridani with her escorts. After following her through the nine-minute passage to the next star system, Devlin's Privateers broke away from the UNS battlegroup without a farewell and steamed out of detection range so they could turn off their stealth to conserve battery power. The energy shunts consumed more than their reactors could put out and now that they were in a 'Long Front' system where search beams from ships seeking battle swept across the system like lighthouse beams, they'd need time to recharge if they wanted to remain undetected when they most needed it.

  Ram Devlin commanded the Otherworlders' small fleet of ad hoc warships, but Absolom was the ship his adopted son had built. Hank Devlin had proved a dangerously practical captain. 29 year-old, cloned Hank had carried all the memories of dead Admiral Harry Cozen since Cozen had died when the boy was nine. Hank's hair had turned shock white around his 27th birthday just like Cozen's had over fifty years ago, and when Ram first saw it, he had managed to hide the alarm he felt. It shouldn't have been a surprise; the boy's DNA was identical. He'd been made as a replacement, an illegal guarantee of immortality. Of course he'd end up looking like his previous incarnation. Seeing it just brought out the ever-present fear that the resemblance between Hank and his predecessor might be more than superficial. Once, 60-year-old Cozen had been in command, but now, 49-year-old Ram gave the orders and Hank was 29 - close to the age Ram had been when Harry Cozen first initiated him to the ways of war and deceit.

  "We're close to our rendezvous point," said Ram. "I'm surprised we haven't spotted the Xihute rebels yet."

  "Maybe the UNS are still too close for their tastes," said Hank. "It might make them nervous. Tell the gun captains to power up but stand by for my order to fire."

  Absolom's XO, Millet, thumbed comms to their three gun chiefs. "All batteries, power up the railgun caps, load the blocks for a full spread, and standby."

  A poorly stealthed ship glinted with Alpha Eridani's raw light and then shimmered over her bow. Asa Biko's junk-tender, Split Aces, pulled ahead, just a few Ks of the starboard bow with her two junks landed on her tiny flight deck. The ship was a conglomeration of borrowed parts set on a jury-rigged raft frame. At just under 165 meters, she sported a reactor and engine cluster from a tug. The command tower was once on the bow of a short hauler running between Deimos Lagrange and Mars. Only a few of their hulls hadn't been built from salvaged halves and thirds of discarded ships and those were the Shediri vessels.

  The pair of Shediri corvettes loaned to him by Auntie Kill's Hive, had fully armored chitin hulls covered with long spines that housed sinks for more effective and efficient energy-shunting stealth. They lurked somewhere above and to the rear of the formation. It was hard to say exactly where.

  Millet said, "System looks clear. At least around us...No transmissions...no emissions."

  "Distance to rendezvous point?"

  "Down to 9,000 Ks now."

  "Where are they? They said they'd be here."

  "They might not have come," ventured Millet.

  "Or they might have changed their minds about the value of trade," said Hank.

  Ram thumbed comms. "This is Ram Devlin. Spread out. We're grouped too tightly."

  Hank nodded to the Shediri at NAV after the bug's translator hissed and clicked the words out for him. Tsk shifted its whole body on four legs while its upper arms addressed the NAV. Ram could tell the bug was nervous. His curving, serrated jaws clacked together twice loudly before he let out a brief sound like a boiling kettle. Tsk's ten-eyed head rotated side to side as he swayed and input the NAV sequence.

  "There!" Hank pointed at the shimmering stars where three Xih
ute ships were powering down the lensing stealth they used to hide their hulls. It bent the light around them so as they powered down the skin of their ships, the stars behind them appeared to bend and shift out of place until the Xihute ships came visible but only as distorted silvery versions of themselves. They rippled like mirages. A few seconds later, their warped lines seemed to unbend and the half-twist hulls and towers came square and solid in front of their formation. "All ships, full stop."

  "1.7 Ks out."

  "Behold the mighty ships of the Xihute rebellion," said Hank.

  "They look worse-off than we do."

  These rebels had stolen their ships instead of piecing them together from mismatched parts, but they'd been without the support of industry in the ten years of their rebellion against their homeworld and the wear showed. Stabbing wounds from the particle beams of the Xihute homeworld fleet had been patched with piled armor plate and a kind of metallic goop to maintain a seal.

  "Their turrets look functional enough." The magnetic acceleration rings used for vectoring the beams peeked out the top of the cannon mounted on their hulls. "Are those guns powered up?"

  "They are," said the second officer.

  "New contact.... 2.3 million Ks...no stealth. 92 mark 11. It's a Staas Company Cutter on patrol. I think they're turning to intercept." Over the tactical station, the red line projecting the company ship's course through the system intersected with the floating representations of Absolom and Devlin's Privateers.

  "Open the holds," said Ram. "Let's make this fast."

  2

  Staas Company Cutter Empress Kate

  Alpha Eridani

  There wasn't even the remotest possibility that Martin Samhain's eyes could have discerned what he sought, but something compelled him to look from his NAV console and out the bridge windows of SCS Empress Kate to search for the invisible.

  "New LiDAR contacts! 2.3 million Ks. 283 mark 19," said XO Wayce. "Nine new contacts. Four human-made...two Shediri vessels...three small Xihute ships there with them."

  The shapes of their hulls appeared over the tactical console. None of them appeared to be warships, but they had six-barrel railgun blocks mounted at the bow and energy shunts over their hulls to provide stealth. The human ships looked like they'd been assembled out of mostly human-made modules meant for other vessels. One had salvaged modules strung out along a short section of tensegrity frame used as a spine. The nearby Xihute vessels were covered in crude patches, held together with alien spit and cold-weld paste.

  "Humans, Shediri, and Xihute together" said Captain Bellamy. "I don't like it."

  The sparrow-sized projections of the nine ships over the tactical console seemed to radiate alarm like startled pigeons. They can see us coming, thought Samhain as longboat and skiff-sized contacts appeared and disappeared between the small ships.

  "Any guess what they think they're doing?" said Torrance from Ops.

  "They're traders," said Samhain. "Looks like they're trying to finish up fast before we arrive."

  "They're trading with the enemy. They're traitors."

  Captain Bellamy said, "All three species have some criminal elements, Mr. Torrance. Mr. Lee, queue our sighting data for transmission to Brisbane via Q-link on our next comms burst, please."

  XO Wayce nodded to the projections over his console. "The small ships are scattering."

  The Xihute engaged the lensing stealth almost all Xihute ships used and a moment later, the stars seemed to wrap around them and hide them from the arrays. They'd cut across the no-man's-land and made for their own lines. The Human and Shediri traders would set a course for the nearest transit point.

  "The Otherworld vessels all have Shediri n-space shunts on their hulls," said the Kate's XO. "Once they decide to disappear, we can't track them...not from this far out. We've got a better chance against the Xihute lensing stealth. I could deploy sensor proxies in a wide spread and have a fix on those three Xihute before they reach the transit to Gladin's Star. If we fight the wrong enemy, we're going to lose this war." Wayce was an ass, but he was right about that.

  Captain Bellamy said, "There's been mention in intelligence briefings of Xihute rebels. Those just might be friendlies if they're trading. In any case, our rules of engagement are set on this. Company Cutters intercept, board, and look for evidence of illegal exports and smuggling. UNS and company carriers get all the battle glory. Flash the Xihute's last known course and probable heading to UNS Westmoreland and her escorts. NAV, make for the Erindi-Vega transit. We'll probably lose the Otherworlders, but there's not much chance they can breach space and leave the system without us noticing."

  "New contact! 25 mark 345, low on the starboard bow, less than 5Ks out. It's small...17 meters." The longboat seemed to blink into existence all at once. The feed from both the active and passive arrays were concatenated in real-time to inform the image of the ghost that now floated a meter-long over the tactical console. Confusion twisted the XO's face as he discretely interrogated the craft with an IFF query. "It's a Staas Company boat; the transponder is valid. But where did it come from?"

  Unfamiliar design elements caught Samhain's eye right away. He saw the fat hull shape he'd expected out of a Staas Company longboat and the new, integrated maneuvering thrusters, but he couldn't explain the four, wide drums at the ends of struts now withdrawing from an extended position.

  "Their version of energy shunting..." Torrance said it like he knew. "How is that sneaky little bastard running stealth systems on a longboat reactor?"

  "Reading that spatial bend?"

  "She's got a negative spacial flux in front of her. That's a Shediri coil-drive on her bow."

  Bellamy said, "They're running alien drive coils on stealthed company longboats now? That's a new one."

  "Everybody has stealth but us," said Torrance. "The Shediri, the Ekkai, the pirates, and now longboats? When do we get some?"

  "The whole point is that we're seen displaying the flag, Mr. Torrance. Stealth defeats that purpose."

  "The boat is 2.7 Ks out now and closing at docking speed."

  "Hail it."

  "Its mama might be nearby; keep looking for it." Bellamy sounded nervous as he eyed the incoming boat. Samhain didn't like the looks of it either. The bow seemed pointed right at him.

  "It's transmitting. The message is text only. I'm sending it to your chair." The decoding took at least a second longer. All of them knew it was comparing a q-linked checksum if it took that long. Only some orders got that kind extra verification.

  Bellamy's eyes narrowed and then, as he read, it was as if some flashing impulse of nervous energy passed through him - a little fright. Samhain saw it. It was what the Captain read that made that happen. The physical response was almost imperceptible, but whatever the message said, it scared him.

  "That boat out there is from Staas Company Intelligence, 4th Division. Internal Security. They say we're to break off our pursuit and come to a full stop." With those words, it was as if the entire bridge crew shrunk at once to become tiny at their stations like the devil himself was just a few Ks off the Kate's bow. "They say they're here for Martin Samhain."

  Samhain tried to force a laugh because it had to be a joke. There was no way this could possibly check out. This was a joke and the Captain had to be in on it. That's what it was, a joke at his expense. Lee faked a half-smile at comms but only because he didn't know what else to do when Samhain looked at him.

  The Captain stared between Samhain's eyes. "It's no joke."

  "4SI? And they're here for Samhain?" He swore he heard hope in Torrance's voice.

  "Why me?" he said because he really hadn't done anything, but eat, sleep, read, and drive a company cutter for several years now.

  "The order doesn't say why."

  "But it's a good question." Wayce stood back from the tactical console like the projection of the spooks' shuttle scared him, but the squinty-eyed suspicion he cast was all anyone saw. "What did you do, Samhain?"

  "I
didn't do anything."

  Torrance at OPs had a grin inside him he wanted to let out, but he wouldn't let it happen here. That snot took the fact that they were coming for him as confirmation that only academy grads like he and Wayce and Bellamy belonged on the bridge. The rest of them stared at him like he was a stranger. In the space of an instant, the glint of friendship that had been in their eyes for him was nowhere to be found. At the first sign of suspicion, they gave him up without a question, without a fight.

  "I didn't do anything wrong," he told them and even having to say that made him look guilty of something.

  Bellamy said, "Mr. Samhain, remove your hands from the NAV console and rise. Slowly if you please." The eyes burned into the back of his head as he stood up. "Very good, Mr. Samhain. Rice, take his station." The Captain waved to the pair of Company Marines at the aft bridge hatch, and then pointed almost gently. They moved from where they'd stood like statues and stepped to either side of him.

  "This isn't necessary."

  "Taking you into custody is part of the orders."

  "But..."

  Bellamy said, "You two, accompany Mr. Samhain to the lift. We're going to the main bay. Don't forget his helmet on the rack there. I'll be coming with you. You have the bridge, XO."

  In the lift the Marines stared straight ahead like they didn't know what was going on and didn't want to. "I just hope you didn't do the company wrong, son," Bellamy said. "Anytime, ever."

  "Captain, I know it's a lot to ask, can't you just try and tell them this must be a mistake. I mean, I've been on this ship for over two years. I haven't done anything wrong and you know it better than anyone. This is a mistake. You know it is."

  After the doors opened onto C-deck and they exited onto the mainsway, Bellamy dismissed the Marines. The Captain walked with him down the last meters to the airlock of the cutter's primary bay. When the airlock hatch opened, Samhain knew that was the end of the road for Captain Bellamy. There were standard fit lids right there, but a helmet wasn't what the Captain needed to follow him now. You couldn't have moved Bellamy with a knuckledragger mech. "Tell the 4SI interrogators the truth; it's the easiest thing to remember," said Bellamy as Samhain put on his helmet, locked the latches, and stepped into the airlock.