by Ian Douglas
And what the hell business was it of anyone else, anyway? Damn it, he wasn’t going to let them ruin his professional life and his personal life as well.
It wasn’t that Laurie Taggart was the love of Gray’s life, or anything even remotely like that. She was a friend . . . a very close friend who happened also to be superb recreation when their mutual schedules permitted it.
He reached up to palm the call panel for the travel pod—and felt a small, inner ping as someone in the room behind him recorded the two of them in front of the door. He probed . . . and learned that the recording was being saved to a file called “Admiral’s Girlfriend.” He scowled and turned, sweeping the room, but couldn’t tell who’d been recording them. The file itself had been anonymous.
In-head software included protocols to inform the subject that he or she was being recorded, a concession to the need for privacy in an electronically wired world. Normally the ping came as a request and included the recorder’s ID, but that information had deliberately been suppressed this time. Well, if someone was recording them, let them. Idiots. He and Laurie had done nothing wrong, nothing against Navy regs, nothing objectionable or questionable. The single danger was if the relationship caused discord or division within the ship’s company, hurt morale, or somehow jeopardized security. The pod arrived, dilated open, and he stepped inside behind Laurie.
“Someone was watching us,” she said, as the pod began accelerating toward the ship’s spine. “Why?”
“Probably just for fun,” he replied. “ ‘Hey, look what the Admiral’s doing,’ that sort of thing. You want me to land on ’em?”
“No. I just think it’s kind of silly.”
“Might also have been a news drone,” Gray said. With the population of a small town—more than 5,000—America had its own internal news service. Someone might have just been gathering footage for the next broadcast.
“Well, that’s not quite as creepy as some enlisted rating spying on us. . . .”
“Just remember, there’s no such thing as privacy on board a Navy ship.”
The travel pod whisked them up to the hab-module hub and zero-gravity, opening into a connector passageway. From there, they made their way into America’s bridge tower, just forward of the turning habs, kissed, then went their separate ways—he to the flag bridge, she to the ship’s bridge located just ahead of and beneath the flag bridge.
“Admiral on the bridge,” sounded in his head, as Gray slid into the embrace of his command seat, opening neural connections with a touch of the implants in his hands and feeling the flow of data surging up into his central nervous system. He felt again the familiar sensation of growing, of becoming smarter, faster, and more powerful as his organic brain merged with the larger consciousness of the America.
“One minute, twenty seconds to emergence,” the ship told him.
He settled back and opened an in-head window as the last few seconds dwindled away. With a thoughtclick, he opened a ship’s library file containing information on the Beehive cluster . . . again.
And then closed it once more. There was no new information there, nothing he’d not gone over and over in the preceding weeks. This operation marked the very first time human ships had approached the Beehive cluster.
Gray wondered what they would find.
“Emergence in five seconds . . . in four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”
The tightly woven gravitational bubble of spacetime enclosing America collapsed, and the carrier dropped out of Alcubierre Drive and into normal space. Stars switched on in all directions, diamond-bright jewels against the endless black.
They’d emerged within the cluster’s heart, and the nearest stars were dazzlingly brilliant. From Earth, only people with exceptional eyesight could discern individual stars. For most, the naked eye revealed only a fuzzy patch, the Nephelion or “Little Cloud,” as Hipparchus had called it, or the Gui Xiu, the “Ghost” of the ancient Chinese. Even a small telescope, however, revealed an explosion of stars, and from here at the cluster’s heart, bright, close stars could be seen in every direction. The majority of the cluster’s stars were red dwarfs, suns far too dim to be seen at a distance of even a very few light years, but over three hundred glowed brightly within twenty light years, making the local sky seem far more crowded than the night sky seen from Earth.
A dazzling pulse of raw light off high and to starboard marked the arrival of one of the other ships of the task force. Gray’s electronic link with the ship provided an ID: the Pan-European Victoire, dropping into normal space twenty kilometers away . . . right next door by astronomical standards.
One by one, other ships appeared scattered across the panorama, either as they emerged from Alcubierre metaspace, or as their light reached America’s sensors from more distant arrivals. Fleets of ships arriving together tended to disperse somewhat—a good thing considering what would happen if two emerging ships tried to occupy the same volume of space at the same time.
“Fourteen ships are now linked in,” Commander Dean Mallory, the tactical officer, reported. “Make that fifteen . . . sixteen . . .”
“Are the High Guard ships on-line yet?” Those three nimble vessels were slated to play an important role at the TRGA.
“Pax and Open Sky are both in,” Mallory said, highlighting two of the cons in Gray’s mind. “Okay . . . Concord just dropped in. All three are in-system.”
“Good.”
“Twenty-one ships are now on the board.”
“Any sign of Charlie One?”
“Affirmative, sir. Bearing one-one-seven, minus six-five. Range . . . estimating . . . roughly seven AUs.”
Gray skewed his in-head panorama to cover the indicated part of the sky, well below America’s artificial horizon. An icon slid into view, and when he concentrated on it, the ship’s electronics expanded it into the fluted, organic curves of the Glothr vessel. The alien was adrift against the spray of bright background stars. Although over twenty-one light minutes distant, the alien evidently had arrived early enough that its light had already reached across to America’s position. As agreed, the alien had waited for the task force. Gray wondered just how much earlier the Glothr vessel had emerged; that information might tell them something more about Glothr technical capabilities.
“How about the Triggah?” Gray asked.
“We have anomalous gravitometric readings in the region beyond Charlie One,” Lieutenant Donovan reported from the ship’s Astrogation Department. “Estimated range . . . fifteen AUs. Approximately one solar mass, but so compressed it’s not visible at this distance. Reads like a black hole, but with no sign of an accretion disk or polar jets.”
“That will be our objective,” Gray announced. “Okay, people. Take us in close to Charlie One. CAG? Tell the Black Demons they’re on the line, ready five.”
“VFA-96 is at ready five, Admiral,” Captain Fletcher, America’s CAG, replied in his mind. Ready five meant that the twelve Starblades of the squadron were positioned in their drop tubes, ready for launch on five minutes’ notice.
America would not be in position to launch for some hours . . . yet Gray wanted to be sure that they were ready for trouble should they encounter it.
USNS/HGF Concord
TF-1
Beehive Cluster
0848 hours, TFT
The message came through for Commander Dahlquist on a private channel, heavily screened and encoded. Dahlquist bypassed Concord’s AI and ran the quantum decrypter himself, downloading the result to his in-head window, and copying it at the same time to his private files.
He was disappointed. The recording, pulled from the in-head of his younger brother on board the America, showed Admiral Gray in what evidently was the officers’ mess on board the carrier. He was standing in front of a travel-pod door facing an attractive female officer—a commander. The scene was suggestive, certainly .
. . but Gray didn’t touch the woman, and wasn’t acting in an inappropriate manner.
He wished there was sound . . . but Fred hadn’t been close enough to hear what was being said, and didn’t have audiofocus implants.
Damn.
What was worse, Fred’s recording had pinged Gray’s implant. There were ways of suppressing the anti-eavesdropping protocols, but evidently he’d not been able to use them. Gray would know that one of the officers in the mess had been recording him.
Dahlquist played the message Fred had sent accompanying the vid. The America was almost three light-minutes away at the moment, so there was no hope of a direct conversation.
Sorry I couldn’t get anything more . . . uh . . . useful, his brother had said. It’s not like they’re having sex right there in the rec area, for everyone to watch. But the scuttlebutt is that he’s banging her on a pretty regular basis. Maybe this vid will help.
Dahlquist played the message through to the end, then deleted it before beginning to encode a reply.
“We need something really scandalous, okay?” he said after thanking Fred for his efforts so far. “I suggest you look up a guy I served with once, Reid Symington. He’s a civilian working in America’s AI suite, and he knows the security systems on that ship inside and out. What I really want is a look at Gray and this Taggart woman in bed together. . . .”
The message completed and quantum-encoded, he fed it through Concord’s ship AI, transmitted it, then wiped the AI’s memory. You weren’t supposed to be able to do that, of course. AIs weren’t considered to be people, exactly, but they were self-aware and sentient, and you weren’t supposed to be able to tamper with their memories. Dahlquist knew a few tricks though . . . tricks taught him by Reid Symington when they were stationed together on the Essex.
He still wasn’t entirely sure how he was going to use the dirt on Gray, assuming he could dig up enough of it to be worth the effort. It would be some sort of a whispering campaign, he thought, gossip—but gossip backed by covertly snatched vids that would prove to everyone that Gray wasn’t suitable naval-officer material. At the very least, he was self-evidently a hypocrite, a guy who claimed a monogie perv lifestyle while living another lifestyle entirely. North American society didn’t much care what you did, or with whom, but it did demand consistency, integrity, and honesty . . . qualities the Periphery’s monogie pervs were hard-pressed to find. Barbarians. . . .
“Incoming laser-com message, Captain,” the ship’s voice said in his head. “From Admiral Gray, on the America.”
Dahlquist felt a stab of sudden panic. Speak of the fucking devil! Had America’s communications suite picked up and decoded his exchange with his brother? How?
And then he steadied himself as the likely explanation kicked in. Gray would want to deliver some sort of send-off speech, something flowery, passionate, and full of duty, flag, and country.
“Put it through.”
Gray’s face appeared on Dahlquist’s in-head window. “Captain Lewis, Captain Dahlquist, Captain Tsang,” he said, addressing the skippers of the three High Guard vessels with the fleet. “I suppose tradition demands that I give you three a send-off speech, something to remind you of how important this mission is to us and to the folks back home. I’m not going to do that. You’ve seen your orders and you’ve had your op briefing. You know this insertion is damned important, and you know why, so I won’t insult your intelligence by giving you a pep talk.
“I will remind you once more of your basic operation parameters. We need to know what’s on the other side of that Triggah, some idea of what’s waiting for us over there. We need to know if the Glothr are leading us into a trap, or are genuine in their offer of high-level negotiations with a new and apparently high-ranking Sh’daar species.
“Your orders state that you are to follow the alien vessel through to wherever it takes you. You will survey the space on the other side and get the data back through the Triggah to the rest of the fleet. Given what we know about other Triggahs, it’s unlikely that the Glothr homeworld will be very close to the Triggah on the other side. As senior officer, Captain Lewis, you will be in overall command, and will decide how best to proceed once you’re over there. I suggest that you leave one watchship close to the Triggah, and have the other two with most of the fighters continue on with the alien ship to its final destination.
“Record everything, avoid conflict if at all possible, and use the fighter squadron to transmit data back through the Triggah to America. We will evaluate your report, and, depending on what you find over there, the rest of the task force will then come through.
“If you find yourself under attack, your orders are to E and E, make your way back through the Triggah, and return to us here.
“This remains a volunteers-only operation. If any of you is having second or third thoughts, now, in front of the Triggah, now’s the time to declare yourselves out. We’ve asked you and your watchships to be our vanguard into the unknown precisely because WPS-100s are highly maneuverable and relatively unthreatening—at least to the uninitiated. So try to avoid a fight if you can, but you are officially weapons-free if you are forced to defend yourselves. The single most important objective for this patrol is to gather data . . . and get that data back here at all costs.
“Okay . . . that’s all I have to say. Upon reception of this transmission, you may proceed with your mission. Good luck, all of you.”
And Gray’s face winked off.
The pompous little bastard, delivering speeches and aping his betters.
Dahlquist was strongly considering backing out of the mission, had been considering that move ever since their new orders had come through a week ago. The memory of Gray’s temper tantrum in his dayroom last week still burned—burned—and Dahlquist found himself detesting the pervy little Prim more than ever.
Well, he would get his own back, soon enough. Unfortunately, both Dahlquists, Terrance and Fred, were going to be on the wrong side of the TRGA . . . he commanding the Concord, and Fred in one of the Black Demon Starblades.
But the more Dahlquist thought about it, the better this looked. While the Prim was pontificating, Fred had reported from the America that Reid Symington had agreed, that he had things covered, and that he should be able to get the vid Dahlquist wanted. And it would be perfect if both Dahlquists were God-knew-where on the far side of the TRGA someplace else, somewhen else when the peek show went down. If Symington screwed up, he would take the fall . . . and it would just be his word against theirs that they’d put him up to it. He’d rather have Gray take the fall, though.
And when they got back from the other side, Symington should have a nicely packaged file ready for Dahlquist’s review.
And fucking Sandy Gray would get the comeuppance he deserved.
Dahlquist wouldn’t jeopardize this mission. He would sit on the goods until they got back to Earth.
But when they did, he would prove that Gray wasn’t fit material for the officer corps, wasn’t fit to wear admiral’s stars, wasn’t fit for command.
The pervy bastard.
VFA-96, The Black Demons
TRGA
M44, the Beehive Cluster
577 Light Years from Earth
1725 hours, TFT
“Launch fighters!”
Accelerated by the spin gravity of the turning hab modules, the twelve Starblades of VFA-96 dropped into emptiness. Seconds later, they emerged from the depths of the shadow cast by the star carrier’s huge shield cap forward. Lieutenant Don Gregory engaged his fighter’s drive and slipped into formation with Demons One, Six, Seven, and Nine, already drifting toward the blunt shape of Charlie One, adrift in hazy, golden light.
“Demon Four,” he announced. “Clear of the ship.”
The alien vessel was a monster, nearly as long as the America and much, much bulkier. Where the USNA star carrier was a five-hu
ndred-meter-wide saucer balanced on a slender spine like an old-fashioned parasol, Charlie One was an elongated, gray-green ovoid, blunt-nosed and -tailed, flattened slightly, and with flutings and grooves and sponsons that made it hard to describe or even remember details of its shape. It had a distinctly organic feel to it, as though it had been grown rather than constructed. It must have out-massed America by hundreds of thousands of tons, and that plump shape housed powers and potentials that humans could only guess at.
It was hanging in space, inactive, motionless relative to the immense shape ten kilometers ahead.
Gregory had been trying not to think about that. Not yet.
The artifact known as a TRGA was all but lost in a thick golden haze of illumination, with individual streamers shaped by gravity, by intense electromagnetic forces, and by the twisting of spacetime itself. More than twelve kilometers long and about a kilometer wide, it was a hollow tube rotating about its long axis at very close to the speed of light.
In the distance, three other shapes were gently closing the range, the three High Guard vessels: Pax, Concord, and Open Sky.
“Welcome to the party,” a voice said—Captain Lewis, of the Pax.
“Thank you, sir,” Mackey replied for the squadron. “Where do you want us?”
“Tucked in tight,” Lewis replied. “With us. Just don’t get too close. Remember that thing’s temporal field.”
The three watchships were closing in behind the alien. Each was closer to the fighters in size than they were to the alien’s bulk. A WPS-100 cutter was just ninety meters long—a tenth the length of Charlie One—and massed twelve hundred tons. Instead of the forward shield cap of larger warships like America, its water stores were housed in an egg-shaped bow tank pierced by the bore of a single high-energy particle-beam weapon. She carried a crew of eight officers and thirty-five enlisted personnel.
Her principle operational strength lay in her maneuverability. Watchships were designed to close with an asteroid that might be coming in from any direction and at high velocity, on a course that threatened Earth or another inhabited body. Her particle beam weapon, her “pee-beep,” in naval slang, could vaporize a large enough chunk of the asteroid’s mass to create a jet of expanding plasma, in effect creating a rocket burst to nudge the boulder onto a new and nonthreatening vector. With both excellent maneuverability and a sharp sting, the WPS-series ships were affectionately nicknamed “wasps.”
