Ep.#6 - Head of the Dragon (The Frontiers Saga)

by Brown, Ryk

  “I stand corrected,” Tug stated.

  “Sorry. I guess after making so many close-in jumps for Captain Scott, I’ve become a bit overly precise in my navigational plots.”

  “There’s no such thing as an overly precise navigator,” Tug insisted.

  “Not according to Josh.”

  “Josh has a different way of flying.”

  “You’ve noticed.”

  “Josh flies more by instinct than by instruments,” Tug explained. “Your piloting style is much different. You fly more by the numbers and the physics than by instinct.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Josh always says that flying is something you should feel, not something you should calculate.”

  “Josh lacks formal training. Many self-trained pilots say such things.”

  “He is good, though.”

  “Yes, he is. However, he lacks understanding of the forces that enable his vessels to do the things they do. When you understand how your ship works, you better understand what you can do with it.”

  “And that makes you a better pilot?”

  “In some ways, yes. It also makes you a safer pilot, and safer pilots tend to live longer, therefore becoming more experienced pilots.”

  “Oh, I’m definitely a safer pilot than Josh.”

  “I would be inclined to agree with you on that point.”

  “Then why is it that Josh always ends up as pilot, and I end up as copilot or navigator?”

  “You do not like such positions?” Tug asked, somewhat surprised.

  “No, it’s not that. I like them fine. I’d just like to get my hands on the flight controls once in a while.”

  “I suspect that Josh is given the pilot’s position on most occasions for two reasons:” Tug explained, “first, because they see the two of you as a team in which Josh is the pilot, and second, because you are always willing to take second seat to him.”

  “So you’re saying I should demand more stick time?”

  “It would not hurt,” Tug told him. “However, in the case of Captain Scott, there is another reason he put you in the navigator’s chair. He knows, as I do, that Josh would not be as good as he is without you with him.”

  “Can you tell Josh that?”

  “I suspect that he already knows,” Tug insisted.

  Loki thought about it for a minute before speaking again. “How do you know that? About the captain, I mean.”

  “I have come to know Captain Scott quite well. He, too, is an instinctive pilot, much the same as Josh.”

  “Yeah, I heard that, but he did have training.”

  “Yes, but his captain put Captain Scott and Commander Taylor together as a team because he knew that each would make the other better at their jobs. He knew that together, they would make an exceptional flight crew. I suspect Captain Scott sees the same potential in you and Josh.”

  Loki was silent for several minutes as he monitored the recon suite. “You know, up until we left Haven, I had never been anywhere but my homeworld and Haven. Now I’ve been to half the systems in the empire.”

  “Before you know it, you will have been to every world in the empire. I suspect that by the time you are my age, you will have been more places than you can imagine.”

  “If we get out of this alive, you mean,” Loki responded.

  “You must have faith.”

  Loki smiled. “How do you do it?”

  “How do I do what?”

  “You’ve been fighting the Takarans for what, thirty years?”

  “Something like that.”

  “How do you keep fighting when you know that the odds are astronomically against you?”

  “Like I said, you must have faith.”

  “Faith in what?”

  “Faith in yourself, faith in those you trust, faith that your cause is just, that it is worthy of succeeding.”

  “Yeah, but you guys are fighting the entire Ta’Akar empire. It will take a miracle to defeat them.”

  “A miracle… like the jump drive, perhaps?”

  “That’s not a miracle, Tug. That’s just science.”

  “That depends on your definition of the word. Is not the jump drive a miraculous piece of technology?”

  “A miracle is something that has no explanation.”

  “I prefer to define it as something that we previously did not believe to be possible, given our current understanding of the world around us.”

  “By your definition, once it happens, it is no longer a miracle.”

  “Only if you understand how it was possible.”

  “So you’re saying you understand how the jump drive works?”

  Tug laughed. “I did not say that. It is enough for me that others more qualified than I understand how it works. The physics involved are far beyond my level of understanding.”

  “Do you think it’s a miracle that the Aurora arrived in the middle of the battle of Taroa inside the shields of the Campaglia?”

  Tug’s smile quickly faded. “I have wrestled with that one for some time now.”

  “Yeah,” Loki agreed, “that one’s not easy to figure out.”

  “Nor is the coincidental name of her captain.”

  “You don’t really believe he’s the guy in the legend, do you?”

  “At first, I did not. Lately, however, I have had my doubts. I have seen him accomplish unbelievable feats, and I have seen him inspire thousands, if not millions, of people to rise up against an empire they believed to be unstoppable.” Tug sighed. “It is difficult, when faced with such evidence, to discount the possibility that Captain Scott is indeed the Na-Tan of legend.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Loki agreed. He stared out the canopy at the blackness of space for several minutes. He, too, had contemplated the unbelievable timing of the Aurora’s arrival, and her captain’s uncanny similarity to the Na-Tan described in the Legend of Origins. As a child, he had read the legends. His family was not a spiritual one, but then again, although the followers weren’t spiritual in nature either, even though they behaved that way. As a child, he had found the legends fascinating. As a young man, he had found them inconsequential. They were who they were, and from which rock they had all originally spawned made little difference in their daily lives. “Tug, mind if I ask you a personal question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Older than you might think,” Tug answered coyly.

  “No, really. How old are you?”

  “Old enough to know that it is time for me to take a well deserved nap,” he added, dodging the question yet again. “Wake me in four hours.”

  “Yes, sir.” Loki checked the recon suite once again, as well as his passive sensors. The Juntor system was quiet as expected. There was nothing more than a mining facility on one of the barren moons of the gas-giant closest to the system’s tiny red dwarf star. Imperial patrols rarely visited the system, as its population was minuscule and its strategic value was just as negligible. However, it still needed to be reconnoitered, as it would be a good place to hide a few Takaran ships.

  Satisfied that there was nothing of interest on his displays, he returned his gaze to the stars outside their canopy. Out there somewhere, more than a thousand light years distant, was the Earth he had read about as a child. The legends had described it as a place of incredible beauty and diversity. All his life, he had only known a history of about one thousand years. Now, a few more millennia had been added to that, and he longed to know more about the history of humanity. It was all out there, somewhere. He only hoped Tug was right, that someday, he would travel to many places. Perhaps even to Earth.

  * * *

  “Captain?” Cameron said, poking her head into Nathan’s ready room. Nathan had become accustomed to leaving the hatch open. Although there was little for him to do on the bridge, especially when they were moored at the docks inside Karuzara, he felt more comfortable being able t
o hear the voices of his bridge staff as they went about their work. Although most of his bridge staff was new, they had taken well to their new jobs, undoubtedly due to the incessant training by Commander Taylor, who now hailed him from the hatchway.

  “Come in,” he told her, gesturing from his place behind his desk for her to enter.

  Cameron entered the room, noticing that Nathan’s gaze had not left his monitor. “Interesting stuff?”

  “On his recon flight through Takara, Tug outlined several possible battle strategies on his data pad. I guess he needed something to kill the time that wouldn’t increase his risk of detection.”

  “Any good ideas?”

  “They’re all good,” Nathan said. “They’re not anything too surprising or outlandish, but they are really detailed. He even includes pros and cons of each strategy, as well as a suggested order of battle, required resources, potential outcomes, even ways that the Ta’Akar would likely counter each strategy.” Nathan leaned back in his chair, finally taking his eyes off the screen. “The man has an amazing mind for this stuff.”

  “Not exactly a molo farmer, huh?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I know he was a pilot in the Takaran military at some point and that his training was in the Palee system, but this… this goes far beyond the kind of training you’d expect a stick jockey to have. This is war college stuff. I mean, he’s even got expected losses and stuff in there.”

  Cameron reached for the monitor on Nathan’s desk. “Do you mind?”

  “Please.”

  Cameron began scrolling through the data, her expression changing to one of surprise which increased as she continued to scroll. “Wow, you weren’t kidding. Attack timings, ordnance lists, routes of ingress and egress, even exit strategies and potential political and cultural ramifications.” Cameron turned the screen back toward Nathan. “He did this all himself?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Has Jessica seen it?”

  “She’s the one who gave it to me.”

  “Well, I’ve seen stuff like this before,” Cameron told him. “I remember reading similar plans back at the Academy that came out of the war college. But those were prepared by groups of people, and it took them weeks, not by one guy sitting in a cockpit for thirty hours.”

  “He has been fighting the empire for three decades, Cam. It stands to reason that he might have been developing such plans over time.”

  “Still,” she said, “definitely not the work of a molo farmer.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Does this have you worried?”

  “More like curious, really,” Nathan said. “I see something like this, and I can’t help but wonder what we do not know about Tug.”

  “Maybe he did attend war college. Aren’t most of the Ta’Akar pilots of noble families? They would have the connections to get their son into such specialized training. I mean, you earned your upper level degree in history before you enlisted. Why would this be any different?”

  “I guess you’re right,” Nathan concluded. “I suppose we should be thankful that he does have such expertise. That, combined with his understanding of the socio-political structure of the empire, makes him an extremely valuable asset for us.”

  “Just as our jump drive makes us an extremely valuable asset for him,” she pointed out.

  “True.” Nathan lost himself in thought for a moment before he remembered that Cameron had come to him. “What did you want to see me about?”

  “Major Prechitt reports that things on Corinair are beginning to stabilize somewhat. Civil security forces and emergency services have managed to get back up and running, and communications networks are slowly being reestablished. It seems all the hospitals have their own networks in order to manage resources and balance patient loads amongst them. They’ve piggy-back their comm-traffic over the medical network until they can get all of their routing points back on line.”

  “Is there any kind of casualty count yet?”

  “It’s too soon to tell. There are thousands of injured in the Aitkenna area alone… hundreds of thousands planet-wide. They haven’t even started with the death toll yet. They’ve only just started to haul the bodies to a central processing area. Reports are that they are planning to cremate everyone.”

  “I thought the Corinairans bury their dead,” Nathan wondered. The people of Earth had all but discarded the practice of burials more than a millennia ago, mostly due to space limitations on an overcrowded homeworld. The bio-digital plague had completely ended the practice of burials altogether, as the survivors feared the deceased could infect them even after death.

  “It’s probably a major logistical problem to bury them all,” Cameron said, “not to mention a potential health problem as well. It’s probably more expedient to take a DNA sample and send the body straight to the incinerators.”

  The idea of hundreds of thousands of bodies being processed and incinerated like common trash was a sobering thought, but one that Nathan realized was in the best interests of the survival of Corinair. “Any word from the government?”

  “Local governments are beginning to hook into the medical networks. The national and planetary governments have yet to recover. They were the hardest hit. I suspect they were all on the primary target list.”

  “You really think the Wallach was executing a prewritten target list?”

  “All the evidence points to that.”

  “The idea that someone took the time to calculate how to most expediently destroy an entire civilization is…”

  “Yeah, I know,” Cameron agreed.

  “What about the Prime Minister?”

  “They’re still trying to dig down to where they think he is located. They have intermittent signs of survivors, but they have no idea as to their identities.”

  “What about their industrial capacity?” Nathan asked. It was a cold question in the light of so many deaths, but it was a necessary one.

  “Reduced by about eighty percent of normal, I’m afraid.”

  “What about the ones that were cranking out point-defense rounds for our rail guns?”

  “Unfortunately, they were destroyed.”

  “Can we retool any of the surviving factories?”

  “Possibly, but it will take weeks, if not months. More than half of the planet’s power generation facilities were also destroyed.”

  Nathan took in a deep breath, letting it out slowly as he considered the report. “So I guess we’re not going to get much help from the Corinairans going forward.”

  “I think at this point, the people of Corinair have their hands full. I’m not sure they’re going to be able to recover from this one, Nathan. I mean, they don’t even have reliable methods to move food and water to the people who need it, let alone continue to produce it.”

  “We need to put pressure on the Ancotans,” Nathan declared. “They have more than enough food and water to go around. They probably have plenty of shuttles they could loan to the Corinairans as well. If we can get them to cooperate, we might be able to get some serious relief efforts underway.”

  “Well, I’ve already gathered up the Ancotans that were part of the crews of the Yamaro and the Loranoi,” Cameron informed him. “They’ll be arriving in a few hours. Hopefully, they will be of some help in convincing the people of Ancot to side with us.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  * * *

  After spending an hour with Tug discussing his various battle plans, Nathan finally had some time off, and he was determined to carry on his tradition of meaningless guy talk over a meal with his friend and chief engineer, Vladimir. Back when they were both new ensigns starting their first tour on the Aurora, they had shared quarters and dined together whenever possible. Once fate had pushed command upon him, Nathan continued the tradition of dining with his friend, as the chance to relax and talk about anything other than the ship’s business was always a welcome distraction. Of course, the conversation always started with ship business, but his fri
end always seemed to find a way to steer the subject toward less official topics. Unfortunately, he was quite late, and he only hoped that Vladimir had not given up on him and left.

  Despite the fact that the Aurora had both a captain’s and an officer’s mess, Nathan and Vladimir had always dined in the crew mess. However, with all the additional Corinari troops on board, the mess hall was not only crowded, but noisy. The officer’s mess had worked for a while, but it was not always an option, as it had also become somewhat crowded. The only solution had been to succumb to the trappings of rank and utilize the captain’s mess.

  The first thing he noticed was that he missed the long walk from the bridge to the mess hall. The captain’s mess was on the command deck, which put him only a minute away from his ready room. The walks had been a chance for him to be alone and think, not to mention to stretch his legs. Now, whatever he wanted would be provided for him at any time in a room that was dedicated to his personal dining. He knew that most captain’s used their mess as a place to meet and share a meal with the junior officers, but it seemed like such a waste of space to him. He had even suggested to Cameron that the space be reallocated for something more important, but she had advised against it, at least for the time being. He had insisted, but in the end, she had won based on the argument that it would take too much effort to convert, as it had its own galley and pantry, along with all the plumbing, electrical, and fire suppression systems as well.

  What it did not have was a cook. When Nathan arrived, he found Vladimir in the kitchen hovering over a large skillet on the hot stove, a slightly soiled apron tied around his waist. There were remnants of several unknown vegetables lying around, and one of the cutting boards was covered with the blood of something recently butchered. The smell of cooking food filled the room, the aroma reminiscent of garlic, meat, and tomato. There were other smells as well, ones Nathan could not identify, but that was not uncommon since they had started eating nothing but Corinairan food more than a month ago.

  “Vlad, what the hell are you doing?”

  “I guess you did not know,” Vladimir answered.

  “Know what?”