The Ember War (The Ember War Saga Book 1)

by Richard Fox

  Simulations like this were as close to actual maneuvers as the ship’s computers could make it; all her screens and feeds were indistinguishable from their real world inputs, which she could return to with the flip of a switch.

  A stream of vector calculus equations crossed her visor and she solved a course plotting that gave the Breitenfeld a three-kilometer buffer between it and a pair of nickel-iron asteroids several times the size of the Breitenfeld. She switched through different angles by pressing tactile buttons on the side of her quad monitors. With tech like this, she wondered how the old American space shuttle pilots even managed to land in one piece.

  “Conn, receive new course heading,” she said. A press of a button on the Ubi screen and the heading went to the ensign at the ship’s helm.

  “New heading, aye,” said the Conn.

  Stacey kept her focus on the spinning rocks ahead of the Breitenfeld, waiting for the inevitable monkey wrench in the simulation. The Breitenfeld’s icon shifted on her screens, no feeling of engines firing or g-forces pressing against her like a real maneuver.

  She did feel footsteps reverberate through her seat as someone approached. Glancing at a small mirror above her workstation, she saw Captain Valdar looking over her shoulder. Valdar had bounced from station to station as the analog drill continued, occasionally conferring with his bridge crew as their involvement in the simulation waned.

  Here it comes, she thought.

  An asteroid, a fractured mountain spewing fragments, spun into view from behind one of the larger asteroids in their path. Stacey didn’t need to consult her Ubi to see the new asteroid would intersect with their course.

  “Conn! Prep evasive maneuvers,” she said. Lights in the bridge flashed red as the warning to strap into the nearest acceleration couch went out. Stacey touched the Ubi to input new calculations—but got no response.

  The Ubi screen flashed yellow and read: MALCODE WARNING. Enemy defenders had broken the ship’s firewalls and slagged the onboard computers. Now, the only computer she could rely on was the one between her ears.

  The irregular asteroid, a long spike jutting off its central mass and spinning like a broken propeller, continued straight for the Breitenfeld.

  “Astrogation, waiting for that new course,” the Conn said.

  Stacey bit her lip hard enough to draw blood and felt a solution come together.

  “Gunnery, fire two rail shots at zero-eight-hundred mark one-three-thousand on my order. Conn set engine six deflection by twelve—No! Give me the Conn,” Stacey said. The equation changed the longer she spoke and her solution would be useless by the time it left her lips.

  She flipped a switch on the side of her chair and two control sticks sprung from beneath panels on her workstation. She canted the Breitenfeld on its port side and redlined the engine burn, ignoring the shouts of protest from the engineering pod.

  “Gunnery…fire!”

  Two rail shots zipped away from the Breitenfeld’s icon and impacted the approaching asteroid on the blade-like protrusion. The kinetic impact from the rail shots slowed the asteroid’s oscillation and the blade passed behind the Breitenfeld with an uncomfortable five hundred yards to spare.

  Stacey let out a cheer and raised her arms in triumph. Captain Valdar cleared his throat and her arms came right back down.

  “End simulation, return computer assistance to all bridge functions,” Captain Valdar said.

  Stacey’s work pod retracted the analog screens into the pod’s torus and holo-screens snapped into being.

  Earth reappeared on the porthole in front of Stacey as the simulation’s faux-view on the synthetic diamond glass ended. She had a waning crescent view, most of it the night side of the planet, the glow of cities delineated the coastline. Thin strands of light marked out the lattice of hyperloop tubes connecting the major cities of Asia. Moscow to Beijing. Beijing to Tokyo and stretching into the dawn leading to San Francisco. Even with the animosity between the world’s powers, people still loved to travel.

  “Ensign,” Captain Valdar said, “that was some impressive work just then.”

  Stacey rotated her pod to face her commanding officer.

  “Thank you, sir. I try.”

  “You try, but you did the vector calculations of this ship, the asteroid variable and the mass deflection from the rail cannons all without the aid of a computer. If I hadn’t watched you do it myself, I would believe such a thing was impossible.” Valdar stepped closer to her pod and opened the control panel on the outside of the torus.

  A privacy filter went up around them, blocking the rest of the bridge crew from hearing their conversation.

  “I read your file. You broke atmosphere for the first time at ten years old, graduated from MIT at fifteen with two doctorates. What I don’t understand is what you’re doing in the navy. Someone with your…background would have other options available to them,” Valdar said.

  Stacey felt her face chill as the blood drained away. He knew. Of course he’d know. He was the captain of the ship and responsible for everything that happened on it. Knowing that a VIP like her was part of his crew would be in his purview.

  “This is how I’ll get deeper into space, sir. Closer to the science I studied in school,” she said.

  “You could have joined the colony fleet.”

  Stacey pursed her lips. “They’re only going as far as Saturn. The Union fleet will set up outposts on Pluto, Eris, even Sedna. I’ll join the company once my contract is up. I’m not saying a faster-than-light slip-coil drive might be ready by then,” she glanced around quickly, “but I hear things.”

  “Very well, Lieutenant Faben, keep up the good work.” Valdar ended the privacy screen and returned to his command chair.

  “Faben” wasn’t Stacey’s true last name. It was Ibarra. Hiding behind a nom de guerre while serving in the navy was a necessity. Having the only heir to the Ibarra empire openly serving the Union Navy would put a giant target on any ship she crewed boarded, and the fame attached to her name would just make her job—and the job of those around her—that much more difficult.

  The Ubi in her thigh pocket buzzed with a new message. She tapped the Ubi through her overalls and the message came up on the corner of her holo display. A time-locked e-mail from her grandfather. She squinted at the release time, which was blank.

  He must have fat fingered the time code. I’ll let him know later, she thought.

  “Captain Valdar,” said the officer in the engineering pod, “sir, we seem to have a malfunction in the slip-coil drive.”

  Stacey and the rest of the bridge crew pretended to stay focused on their workstations, but every ear was cocked to Valdar as he sat in his command chair. He pulled up the engineering feed and swiped through overlays.

  “Malfunction how?”

  “It’s started the charge cycle. The Ibarra techs running the device don’t know why it’s doing that,” the engineer said.

  “EWO?” Valdar asked the electronic warfare officer, who was responsible for the integrity of the ship’s computer systems and disrupting any enemy systems in turn.

  “Nothing, sir. All firewalls and active protection measures are intact,” the EWO replied.

  “Commo, send an update to the flagship. Tell them we’re working the issue,” Valdar said.

  “Right away, sir,” said the platinum-blond officer in the communications pod. Stacey liked to tease the Norwegian officer that his head could be used as a beacon if the ship ever lost all power. “Sir, the rest of the fleet is reporting a similar malfunction. Every ship with a slip-coil drive.”

  “Sir,” the engineer said, “the Ibarra techs say they might be able to do a hard shutdown but they’ll need corporate approval for that. Worst case, the drive will fire in…forty-nine minutes.”

  “And what then?” Valdar asked.

  “The course to Saturn is already laid into the slip coils, sir. We’re locked out of our navigation systems,” the Conn said.

  Valdar glanced at
Stacey, who gave a miniscule shrug of her shoulders in return.

  “Well, this is damn peculiar,” Valdar said.

  ****

  Lawrence flapped his hands in the air, stepped up onto the tips of his toes and exhaled loudly.

  “Three…two…one, I’ve got this,” he said. He massaged his cheeks and snapped his fingers next to his ears. A passerby might assume Lawrence suffered from a host of nervous ticks. His pre-speech rituals were odd but they readied him for engaging with the media. Old Man Ibarra had told him his public-speaking skills were a key factor in his decision to make Lawrence the CEO of the Saturn Colonies, that and his command of an infantry company during the Jeju Island campaign.

  Lawrence had always wondered why Ibarra insisted on staffing the colony with so many former military men, but asking Ibarra questions was a sure way to get fired.

  The door to the briefing room opened and an aide waved Lawrence inside.

  There was no press room on the America, so one of the many briefing rooms for the fighter squadrons served as a stand-in. Lawrence entered the room and gave the assembled journalists his plastic-surgery-perfect smile. Every seat was packed with reporters, personal recording drones hovering in the air above their respective owners like starving hummingbirds. Every major news network on Earth was here for this—humanity’s first colony expedition since the Mars landings forty years ago.

  “Hello everyone, I’m Theodore Lawrence, chief executive officer of Saturn Expeditions, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Ibarra Corporation. Thank you for making the long trip from Earth to this fleet anchorage. There’s not a lot of scenery on that trip and if your Ubi battery dies, it feels a lot longer than fifteen hours.” He flashed his gleaming white teeth with the award-winning smile and got a few decent laughs from the crowd.

  “But the trip this colony is about to embark on is a bit different than a shuttle from Luna to Earth. It took the first colony ship nine months to reach Mars, and at the same speed this fleet would reach Saturn in almost three and a half years. You’ve all had a tour of the Mayflower–class colony ships and know how cramped they are. We wouldn’t have had so many volunteers if we advertised those conditions in the brochure.” Again with the smile, nowhere near as many laughs.

  “But thanks to yet another breakthrough from the scientists and engineers at the Ibarra labs, we have the slip-coil drive, a modified Alcubierre engine that can create just enough of a dip in space time to propel our ships at enormous speeds and cut the travel time to Saturn to a mere eight days. I’m sure you’ve all seen the—”

  “Mr. Lawrence, why is the Ibarra Corporation only taking Ibarra employees on this mission? There are far more qualified and eager people to participate in this mission than whoever’s willing to agree to your company’s draconian personnel policies and restrictive background checks,” the reporter from a South American net channel asked.

  “The Ibarra Corporation is the single source of funding for this mission, and since no other sovereign nation seems interested in joining us on this historic moment we—”

  “You have an Atlantic Union fleet escorting you! What does a colony need with a military escort that could wipe out the Martian colonies?” asked the only journalist from the Chinese Hegemony, Hu Bing, seated a few rows from Lawrence and surrounded by news organizations from countries occupied by China. Lawrence had come prepared for a hostile audience.

  “Our armed escort is fully funded by the Ibarra Corporation and isn’t technically part of the Atlantic Union until it returns from Saturn. After the…security incident on Mars, we decided an abundance of caution was needed to secure our long-term investment,” he said. Calling the Chinese seizure of the joint American-Japanese cities on Mars a “security incident” was being polite. It was entirely possible that all nine billion human beings on Earth would see this exchange and being testy wouldn’t help with public perception.

  “Your company has no right to Titan or any of the other moons. China established sovereignty on those worlds three decades ago with the Daoda Yuan missions,” Bing said. The sycophant reporters around him nodded in support while most of the rest of room rolled their eyes or huffed their dismissal.

  “I’d like to remind you of the Treaty of Saigon, which the Chinese Hegemony is a party to, that allowed for unrestricted access to any place in the solar system where a physical presence had already been established. The Huygens probe from the now-defunct European Space Agency has been on Titan since 2005, and the rights associated with that probe were sold to the Ibarra Corporation long before the treaty. I fail to see your objection,” Lawrence said.

  Instead of going to the next challenge as Lawrence’s public-relations strategists had anticipated, Bing snatched one of the floating camera droids and threw it at Lawrence with the speed and accuracy of a major-league baseball player. The droid hit Lawrence right in his perfect teeth. His hands flew to his mouth as pain lanced through his face. Hot blood flowed through his fingers and he stumbled against the back wall.

  He heard rapid-fire, high-volume Chinese ringing through the briefing room as strong hands guided him away. Those same strong hands slammed him against the bulkhead and Lawrence found himself face-to-face with a very angry-looking Admiral Garrett. The admiral bunched his hand into Lawrence’s bloodstained suit and lifted him an inch into the air.

  “You care to explain why the slip-coil drives are powering up?” Garrett asked, his voice a low growl.

  Lawrence gagged on blood running down his throat and felt a loose tooth with his tongue.

  “Whaa?” His fattening lips provided a new obstacle to speaking.

  “Every slip-coil drive in the fleet is cycling—your passenger and construction ships, every one of my warships. Why? We agreed to leave tomorrow and now you pull this kind of crap? What’s your game?” Garrett asked.

  Lawrence glanced down at the hands pinning him to the wall. They looked like they belonged to a farmhand and could do even more damage to his face if Garrett was so motivated.

  “I don’t know. The drive techs on the ships were supposed to wait until I gave the order—and I haven’t. Swear,” Lawrence said, his bulbous lower lip making his words sound like baby babble.

  “Shut it down. We aren’t leaving until Breitenfeld joins the line.”

  Lawrence winced and poked at his split lip.

  “I can’t. No one can. They’re the most sophisticated things we’ve ever developed, and a bit experimental. We’ve never tried to shut them down while they’re engaged so we made sure it was impossible. The drives will form the slip bubble around every ship and take us straight to Saturn,” Lawrence said. Garrett’s shovel hands finally let him go.

  “Experimental?”

  Lawrence froze in place. He shouldn’t have said that.

  “Well, given the expense and rarity of the quadrium in the engines, we didn’t do a full test. But the math works and Mr. Ibarra is never ever wrong about these sorts of things. If I didn’t think it was safe, would I be on this ship?”

  As a trained expert in negotiations, the twitch to Garrett’s lips and his balled fists gave Lawrence the hint that the admiral wasn’t taking the news well.

  “Sir!” An officer ran down the corridor, one of Garrett’s senior staff members if Lawrence remembered right. “You’re needed on the bridge, priority message from the Pentagon,” the aide said.

  “Get those reporters off my ship now,” Garrett said. He turned away and stepped down a side corridor with the aide.

  From the briefing room, Lawrence heard shouting in multiple languages as another personal drone crashed against the wall.

  “Return to your seats or we will use non-lethal force to restore order!” boomed from the briefing room. One of the onboard Marines had activated his anti-riot broadcasts.

  Lawrence tapped his fingertips against the blood seeping down his shirt and felt another loose tooth.

  “This wasn’t in my job description.”

  ****

  In the Breiten
feld’s sick bay, Hale raised his right arm above his head, then swung it forward and backwards as if he was a windmill. He was sure he looked as silly as he felt. The medic on the other side of a glass panel tapped at a holo display invisible to Hale. Patient information was exclusive to the medical personnel until they deemed it necessary to share. Seeing just how bad one was hurt tended to impact a patient’s resolve to hold on to life.

  The sick bay’s surgical robot had mended his broken bones and re-knit his torn skin and muscles in a few hours; the human doctor had stepped in only a few times to correct the robot’s work. If his injuries had been worse, he could have been evacuated to the full surgical suites on the America or the Constantine, which were on par with the best facilities on Earth. Worse case, his arm could have been amputated and replaced with a bionic until a vat-grown replacement could catch up with him, a more extreme option that would only be considered only in a time of war.

  “Good thing we’re exempt from the new skipper’s analog drill. Manual surgery like that would’ve taken forever, not to mention recovery time,” the medic said. “Bring your arm across your chest for me and pull it hard, please.”

  Hale complied as scratches of pain emanated from the pink scar tissue on his bicep.

  “Little neurological sensitivity, but that’ll fade in a few hours,” the medic said. He closed his displays with a swipe of his hand and tossed a uniform jacket to Hale. “I’ll mark you fit for duty. Come back if it falls off,” the medic said.

  Hale slid his stiff arm into the jacket and left the sick bay.

  An alert display in the corridor marked the ship as still under an analog drill. This didn’t mean much for Hale and his Marines; during a void engagement the Marine complement would join damage-control parties and repel boarders as needed. Trying to run a ship without the aid of the central computer core was a problem more for the bridge crew and the sailors.