Borderlander

by Joshua Guess

  Borderlander

  Book Two of The Ghost Fleet

  Joshua Guess

  ©2017 Joshua Guess

  Dedication

  The problem with reaching for the stars

  is that catching them can burn you.

  Dedicated to those of you unafraid of the fire.

  Prologue

  The ship felt different since the name change.

  When she’d been a Navy prototype, there was no name at all. Just a long designation handed out by the R&D division. When Grant Stone and his former service mates bought her, fixed her, and registered her as an independent vessel, she’d been called the Fallen Angel. It was a play on the fact that like the three of them, the ship’s origins came from the service.

  Now they were part of the Ghost Fleet, the loose conglomeration of non-military ships put together by the newly-renamed Naval Intelligence Agency, or NIA, operating as both an apparatus to gather information as well as combat threats when the need arose.

  Grant and his crew were pressed into service when a race of artificially intelligent machines calling themselves the Children tried to hem in the human race by destroying their ability to travel through the Cascade. The damage done to the fabric of space in unsettled systems was bad enough in places to prevent anything from entering them, but fortunately the plan was barely out of the nascent stages of implementation before being discovered.

  The Angel spent eight weeks in dock being repaired and upgraded. As part of the Ghost Fleet, Grant’s license was also upgraded from Independent Vessel to Free Company. Free companies were mercenary units, able to perform a huge variety of operations. They were rare and those who ran under the banner of a free company almost always fell into one of two camps.

  They either got rich, or they got dead.

  The original ship with its random alphanumeric designation was a failed design for a battering ram. The Fallen Angel was a chunk of silver steel with engines too large for its body and one of a handful of ships of her size that could open its own gate into the Cascade.

  The Seraphim, in Grant’s opinion, felt like another beast entirely. Oh, she had the same lines and shape of the ship she had been. No denying on a close look that she was the same vessel. But with new and upgraded weapons systems, new armor and exterior coating, and a complete overhaul of the interior from the deck plating up, Grant hardly recognized her. The name change was a concession meant to sell the fact that their crew was serious about making a go as a free company, yet Grant couldn’t help internalizing all the changes. Not bad, necessarily. Just different.

  After two months of nonstop work, he was finally getting used to it.

  “How are we looking?” Grant said from the captain’s chair, its displays arrayed in front of him with a dizzying volume of information.

  The voice of his executive officer squawked over the com. “We’ve got the package, Cap. Hauling it out of the gravity well now.”

  Grant let out a sigh of relief. “Roger that. We’ll be ready for you.”

  “Commander Cho almost sounded disappointed,” Iona said from the new operations alcove Grant had asked the Navy to install for her. As a sim—an artificially intelligent living machine—she didn’t need physical controls for her work. She was linked to the ship wirelessly. But Grant like the idea that in the event of some unknown catastrophe, Iona could take command and keep the crew alive should that link fail.

  “She is,” Grant said. “We’ve spent the last two months combing every port on our part of the list to remove the weapons the Children planted. Crash has had more flight time in her new toy than I’ve put in commanding from this chair. She’s in heaven.”

  Thanks to a solitary member of the Children, a being that called itself Child Blue, the Planetary Alliance had access to hidden caches of information that gave up the location of the devastating arsenal meant to cripple or kill the majority of the human race. They’d been damn smart about it, too. Plagues made up of diseases, nanomachines, and half a dozen other flavors of awful had been cleverly introduced to the shipping lanes. No one looked twice at a sealed container with all the right paperwork. Over the last two months, they had recovered more than a hundred of them from half as many worlds, colonies, and orbital stations. Grant’s ship was only one of a hundred doing the job.

  The scope was terrifying, but now that the lion’s share of the threat was over—at least this facet of it—he could finally relax a little. There was nothing to put pressure on a man like knowing inefficiently doing the job might mean the death of tens of millions of people.

  He looked over at Iona. “I assume you were eavesdropping. How’d it go? Any trouble with the Board of Governors?”

  Iona raised a blonde eyebrow. The color was new and stood out starkly against her dark skin. Grant had encouraged her to try new things now that she was living away from the usual confines of sim life aboard a Navy ship. “Hardly eavesdropping. I was acting as overwatch for this operation, as you well know.” She winked at him. “That said, the governors were more than happy to comply. They didn’t want McDowell colony exposed to whatever is inside that container any more than we did.”

  Officially, their free company was under contract with the civilian government of the Planetary Alliance. Which meant on paper that they had the right to demand and receive any assistance from the local governors for the removal of ‘contraband’ containers. The governors themselves were in the loop, but Grant dealt with enough bureaucrats to know it was a toss of the dice whether they’d bother firing two neurons in the name of the public good.

  “Container incoming,” Iona said.

  Grant blinked. “That was fast. What are they using to get that thing off the planet?”

  Iona paused for a fraction of a second. It was by now a familiar mannerism, a way for her to let the people around her know she was accessing vast feeds of data and analyzing them internally. “Well, that was nice of them. They sent it up on a priority freighter. The container is its only cargo.”

  “Nice,” Grant said. “Send drop-off coordinates and get us ready for our run.”

  Grant turned in his chair to look at his pilot and navigator, Bastian Krieger, but the other man held up a finger. “Already ahead of you, Captain. I have laid in several intercept courses and Mister Batta informs me that we are ready to extend the bubble as needed.”

  “Fantastic,” Grant said. He keyed the com. “Dex, is the capture system ready?”

  *

  The rebuild couldn’t increase the interior volume of the ship in terms of pure physics, but the odd design ethos that went into designing the Seraphim—a name he still wasn’t used to using—meant that in practical terms, this could be accomplished. The main body of the ship was spun up and shaped from a ball of molten steel in the vacuum of space, the interior carved from it. She needed the mass to serve her two main functions—the ability to gate on her own, and the ram the shit out of other ships when she arrived—which left plenty of thick walls behind.

  Dex was given his own small lab before they’d been suicidal enough to actually use the ship for her original purpose and ram their way inside an enemy communication hub the size of a small moon, and doing so had given them a strong indication what internal supports could be safely thinned or removed. Thus his lab was now a third larger than before, enough to give him space to build and tinker as he saw fit.

  “Hey! Dex! Are you alive down there?”

  He sat up from his work bench and wiped the sleeve of his jumpsuit across his brow. “What? Sorry, sir, I was distracted. What was the question?”

  “The capture system,” the captain said in a long-suffering voice over the speaker. “Is it ready?”

  Dex gave the com unit a wry look, which struck him as dumb since no one else coul
d see it. “Of course it is. I made sure it was ready the second we jumped into this system and have a continuous diagnostic routine pinging me every thirty minutes letting me know it’s in perfect working order.”

  “Oh,” the captain said. “Well, that’s good, then. We’ll be intercepting in ten minutes before making the transition to warp. Thought you might want to grab Batta and watch this from the bridge.”

  Dex looked down at his hands, brown skin filthy with grease and soot and other stains from his work. “That would be great. I’ll clean up now and be there in five.”

  The captain was chuckling as he closed the channel. Dex had worried that his relationship with Iona would cause problems, but it only seemed to amuse the older members of the crew. Not that Dex would refer to them as older to their faces, despite the fact that he was only twenty and they ranged from thirties on up.

  He scrubbed as quickly as possible in the small sink and rushed toward the bridge. By the time he got there, Krieger was firing the forward vents of the conventional drive to slow them down enough to match the velocity of the shipping container. The monitors gave a rendered view, part real images captured by the exterior cameras, part generated image to give them a better look.

  It wasn’t impressive. A metal box twenty meters long and three meters high and wide. It looked like every other container they’d captured and destroyed. Only the knowledge of what lay inside gave the thing any importance at all.

  Thanks to Child Blue, they’d been able to work out everything needed to safely dispose of the containers. Because of the rigorous checks by Alliance customs, no complex electrical systems could be active inside without being noticed. Instead, each crate contained a low-power receiver waiting for an activation signal which would power up the systems within from batteries and release the contents in a calculated wave.

  The solution Child Blue included in his message was to freeze the damn thing. Too much tampering would trigger alarms, but the containers did go through a lot of abuse during transport. The Children had taken this into account. A little damage here and there wouldn’t cause any fail safes to trip, which gave them an opportunity.

  Commander Cho—who only the captain and Batta referred to as Crash, her call sign—volunteered for ground operations. She was the one who organized the quarantine of each box and risked her life cutting a small hole into them. She filled them with water and waited as the coolant lines turned the whole thing into a block of ice. It was a primitive solution, one so basic that the Children hadn’t thought to guard against it.

  Dex watched as Abby Spencer, the communications and sensor officer, coordinated the incoming sensor data with the others on the bridge. Dex stood back, content to observe now that his part was done.

  The capture system spooled out on the monitor, a hundred meters of flexible, segmented cable that could bend and shape itself into almost any configuration. Four of them stretched out from the dorsal surface of the Seraphim and latched onto the container. Once the metal box was drawn close against the cargo blocks on the top of the hull, Commander Cho brought her heavily modified Ravager fighter back to its dock on the ventral docking port designed just for it.

  “Crash, are you buttoned up?” the captain asked over the com.

  “Yep,” she replied. “Don’t wait for me.”

  Captain Stone rose from his chair, pushing the console array to one side. He stretched. “Krieger, get us away from the gravity well and take us to warp. Let’s take out the trash.”

  “Yes, sir,” Krieger said in his faint German accent.

  It didn’t take long. The warp bubble came up a few minutes later and only remained in place long enough to whisk them deeper into the system. When the bubble dropped, the screens had adjusted to almost black.

  “Drone operations complete,” Iona said. “Container is docked with the disposables, sir.”

  On the screen, the box detached from the hull and moved slowly away in puffs of thruster fire. The automated drones used to attach simple guidance and propulsion systems to it worked extremely well after so many runs.

  “Give me the plot,” the captain said.

  A path in space glowed on screen, showing the flight of the container once the attached systems activated. It led in a curving line into the photosphere of PA-121, the parent star for McDowell colony. The container would disintegrate long before actually reaching the star, of course, but momentum and gravity would conspire to pull the remains in either way.

  “Do it,” the captain said.

  On the one hand, the scene was anticlimactic. The rockets attached to the container would only last a little while before spending their fuel. It was more than enough to ensure the thing was destroyed. From his perspective, all that happened was a minor burn of some minor engines before the container disappeared from sight against the dimmed brilliance of the sun in front of them.

  On the other hand, this meant their grueling sixty days without ten minutes of free time was over. And that on top of the weeks they spent working double shifts helping to repair the ship.

  “Okay,” the captain said, falling into something closer to the relaxed, casual man he’d been before the Navy roped them into being a part of the Ghost Fleet. “Now we can take a damn vacation.”

  Dex grinned at Iona.

  Finally.

  1

  Crash was elected to pick their vacation spot. This was a more exciting prospect for the crew of the Seraphim than it might be for other independent vessels, even other free companies. Not only did they have their own gate system, allowing them to travel anywhere they wanted through the Cascade, but as a former military vessel, they didn’t even have to worry about fuel or reaction mass for the conventional drive systems. Her baby was designed to grab what it could from planetary bodies the size of comets on up. Even clouds of hydrogen could be used in a pinch.

  She had listened to their suggestions before shutting herself in the unused junction room she’d turned into an office. The letter she’d written to her family before their suicide run at the communication hub run by the Children months earlier was still on her monitor. She’d sent it along, of course, but with a delay/delete attached that would leave the letter stuck in a queue for three days before delivery. Thankfully, she’d been able to stop that delivery. Some things you don’t say to your mother while you’re still alive, after all.

  Crash—she’d stopped thinking of herself as Bit-na or anything other than her surname or call sign years ago—studied the list of choices put together by the crew and frowned. There were certainly some good ones if all they wanted was a fun time, but she and the captain had other needs. Namely the fact that most of their crew had been summarily dismissed by the Navy when they’d been dragged into the Ghost Fleet. They were supposed to have had time to hire new technicians and combat specialists after the immediate threat posed by the Children had passed, but then there was this business with locating and destroying the automated weapon caches.

  From here on out, they would be able to take real jobs in between missions for Commander Sharp, the head of the Ghost Fleet. Which meant having more than two engineers below decks no matter how talented they were. Other than Dex and Batta, everyone but the bridge crew was gone.

  She cross-referenced the wish list of vacation spots with the one Sharp had given her showing designated hubs of Ghost Fleet operatives between ships. With a thousand vessels in the secret fleet at any given time, there were always hands wanting a change of scenery or whose ships had been damaged beyond repair. The latter was depressingly common, especially since a race of genocidal, artificially intelligent machines decided to make enslaving humanity their pastime.

  The overlap was nonexistent, which really shouldn’t have surprised her. The Alliance stretched across a thousand light years and thousands of settled worlds, stations, and colonies. The chance that a handful of destinations in two wildly different categories would match up was slim at best.

  She leaned back in her chair and put her hands be
hind her head. Chewing on the inside of her mouth in thought, Crash studied the destinations.

  “Give me a map with list A highlighted in blue, and list B in yellow,” Crash said to the computer. The machine complied, immediately popping up a badly off-scale map of Planetary Alliance space. The closest two glowing dots of different colors were a dozen light years apart. Not that far at all using the Cascade. “What’s the travel time between those two? The closest from each list?”

  “At maximum warp, transit time would be—”

  Crash waved a hand, a gesture the computer had long since learned to interpret correctly as being told to shut the hell up. “Cascade time. We don’t use warp for interstellar travel anymore and you know it, you smart ass bucket of diodes.”

  “Cascade points between these two systems are category two, with moderate to severe turbulence,” the computer said in a soothing electronic voice. “Direct transition between them is not recommended. Transition time is one hour, fourteen minutes with optimal initial gate configuration.”

  Well, shit. That was easy enough. The captain would fucking hate enduring a category two run, especially for more than an hour, but he’d do it if it meant giving the others what they wanted while also hiring on some fresh faces.

  In point of fact, Crash didn’t much like the idea herself. The Cascade was a weird n-dimensional plane that required highly specific education and a brain more inclined to advanced math and physics than hers was to even begin to understand. While technically any two points in space could be used as references to create a tunnel through the Cascade, practically only solar systems worked. Something about the almost-but-not-quite flat curvature of space five or so AU and further from a star made creating Cascade points cheaper, energy wise. Even then, not all transition lanes were created equal. Using ideal jump points could take you from one side of the Alliance to the other, the whole thousand light years, in a handful of hours.