by Evan Currie
Eric expected nothing less.
In terms of basic maintenance, the Odysseus was as ready to fight as the day she’d sailed out of the Forge for the first time. It was crew readiness he was a little concerned about, but he’d sweat the bullshit out of them if he had to.
Damn few problems can’t be cured by exhaustion, sleep, or a judicious ass kicking.
He hoped he wouldn’t have to resort to the third option, though Eric was far from being above such things if that was what it took to get the job done. He’d seen too much over the years, and if it cost him his career to keep his people living, he was willing to take the chance. The only matter that took higher priority was accomplishing the mission, and even then he’d sometimes sacrifice a mission if it meant saving his people. Such decisions depended very much on the importance of the mission.
The current one, well, there was no higher-value mission. Ever.
He just didn’t know if the victory conditions would be possible to meet.
“Commodore,” Miram said, gesturing him over. “You’re going to want to see this.”
“What is it, Commander?”
“Ranquil Command just relayed this from EARTHCOM. It’s a cipher transmit from the Auto.” Miram looked evenly at him, shaking her head. “Not good news, sir.”
“Let’s see it.” Eric reached out to pull the screen in his direction as he leaned over.
“The enemy fleet.”
Miram nearly jumped out of her skin as she and Eric twisted in place to glare at the slight form of the armored boy who had appeared between them like an apparition.
“Don’t do that, Odysseus!” Miram hissed, clutching at her chest.
“Apologies. I forget.”
Eric glowered at the boy, knowing damn well that was bullshit.
“Attention!” he barked, causing Odysseus to snap straight reflexively.
Knowing how the boy’s thoughts were partially formed by the crew of the Odysseus made understanding him slightly easier.
“Is that how you approach your CO?” Eric growled.
“No sir!” the boy squeaked out in a voice that was almost, though not quite, cracking like a teenager going through changes. “Sorry sir.”
“You had better be. Or I will find a way to show you the meaning of real discipline. Are we clear?”
“Yes sir! Sorry sir!”
“One step back,” Eric ordered. “Clear my personal space now.”
The boy responded instantly, dropping back one step before returning to the automatic stiff posture with eyes staring straight ahead.
“Do not move,” Eric said before turning back to Miram, who was looking a little surprised. “Please, Commander, continue.”
“Yes sir, Commodore. The Auto reported fleet movement in our direction. It’s significant.”
Eric sighed, unsurprised. The only question in his mind had been when the Empire would make their serious play, not whether it would happen. He looked over the numbers that were in the file and whistled.
Not good.
He was clearly looking at a force intended to permanently deal with the resistance the Empire had encountered.
“They’re through playing games,” he noted, keeping his voice calm. “Well, we’re going to have our work cut out for us.”
Miram shot him a disbelieving look, clearly wondering if he hadn’t read the intelligence wrong. She pitched her voice low. “Sir, I don’t think we can even slow them down.”
“You might be right,” Eric conceded, allowing the volume of his voice to rise up and carry his words clearly around the command deck. “Yet we’ll have to do what we can. For now, as best we can tell, they don’t know the location of Earth. However, look at the number of those ships. If they take the Priminae, they’ll have the forces free to search. We won’t stay hidden for long, so we make a stand and we turn them back.”
Miram glanced to one side, her attention caught as she saw the armored head of Odysseus lift up, chin rising slightly, matching the shifting posture of those within earshot.
For a moment, as Miram stood there, she actually felt like they would do exactly that.
Then, of course, she looked at the numbers again.
Priminae Central Command, Ranquil
Admiral Rael Tanner slumped behind his desk, trying but failing to process the warning he’d just received from the Terran allies. The sheer number of warships made no sense to his mind. He just couldn’t conceive of what they meant.
Who would ever need to build such an armada?
The way of war was alien to him, for all that he had chosen his current position, and so the sheer mass of ships he found himself facing had left him entirely unsorted.
“Few worlds have men such as yourself in their command.”
Tanner nearly leapt from his seat, still unused to the now-regular visits from the entity he had once believed to be an ancient computer system.
“How many times have I asked you not to do that, Central?” he demanded.
“Forty-three. Well, forty-four now I suppose.”
Tanner scowled at the slightly odd-looking figure before him, odd more in the fact that there was nothing memorable about the man, assuming it was a man. One’s eyes seemed to skate too easily off blurred features. In the moment, nothing remarkable, but as soon as he looked away, Tanner couldn’t remember anything about the man besides a slightly luminescent blur.
“What do you want this time?” Tanner asked, aggravated.
He supposed he should be more deferential to the de facto leader of the entire world and influential leader of the Priminae people, but, frankly, he was more than a little annoyed with the entity for having fooled them for so long.
“As I’ve said before, it isn’t what I want that you should focus on,” Central replied easily. “It is what you need.”
“What I need is an armada. If you would care to pull one from wherever you come from I would be most appreciative,” Tanner growled, standing up and walking over to a small station with refreshments, where he poured himself something to drink. “I would offer you something, but I honestly do not want to.”
Central laughed softly, amused.
“I am certain I will survive your dislike, Rael. Will you survive what is coming . . . without help?”
Tanner slammed down the container, splashing his hand and the station with the faint blue liquid within. He glared angrily at the entity. “What would you have of me?”
“Rael,” the entity said soothingly, “I would have you for a friend. Ask and I shall offer what I can. Do not ask, and I will offer everything I can think of anyway. This is not some bargain I am attempting to strike. Physically, my resources are limited, but I am, in many ways, the sum total of every mind ever to live, grow, and die on Ranquil. I would offer my strength in defense of my home . . . I feel that it is unlikely that this Empire would treat you well, my . . . friends.”
AEV Odysseus, Ranquil System
Eric didn’t have any brilliant answers to the current problem. The fleet numbers were beyond any tricks he might have up his sleeve, and the Empire was very human at its core. The Imperials were learning beasts and tool users, and had clawed their way up the food chain by being smart enough to turn any small loophole to their advantage.
Just like Terrans.
That made them dangerous in ways that the Drasin just couldn’t even approach.
Numbers alone were nothing in comparison to intelligence, creativity, and sheer dogged refusal to bow before the inevitable.
So he found himself growing more and more mired in his own worries, despite what he had said to Miram, Odysseus, and the nearby crew.
For times like this he only had one person on board he could speak with, so Eric redirected from his course and headed there.
Steph looked up as the commodore entered his quarters and didn’t have to look twice to recognize the mode the man was in.
“How bad are we looking at, Raze?” he asked, recognizing that the man standing
before him was not Commodore Eric Weston but without any shadow of a doubt was instead Raziel, Secret of God, the wing commander of the Double A Task Force he had signed up with during the war.
“The worst I’ve ever seen,” Eric answered simply.
Steph whistled, getting up from where he had been sitting on the edge of his bed and walking to a cupboard built into the wall. He opened it and pulled out a bottle of amber fluid, unscrewing the cap smoothly before taking a long draw and handing it over to his commanding officer and friend.
“Tell me about it, then.”
Eric slumped into the rolling chair that he’d pulled out from under the small desk, accepted the whiskey Steph offered, and took a pull.
“We’re fucked.”
Steph grimaced, taking the bottle back.
“Going to need more than that, boss.”
Eric smiled ruefully. “Passer got a read of the Imperial flotilla. The numbers suck.”
“I could have guessed that. How much suck?”
“Black hole?” Eric shrugged. “They’ve got us outnumbered by . . . thirty to one, conservatively speaking? Outmassed by more than that again.”
Ouch.
“That . . . sounds bad,” Steph admitted.
They exchanged the bottle a couple more times in silence.
“They have ways of neutralizing our key weapon systems, more or less,” Eric said, settling back in the chair. “The singularity cores disrupt transition cannons . . . We can’t do much with the nukes other than target the ships’ extremities. Unfortunately, those are often too close to the warps generated by the drives, and now they’ve learned to use chaff to disrupt pulse torps. We still hold a power advantage due to our lasers and armor, and could win a slugging match on even or slightly uneven odds, but this is too much, Steph.”
“We’ve faced too much before, Raze. We’ll figure something out.”
“I don’t know what. This time I just don’t know.”
Steph gestured offhandedly. “Why don’t we transition the torps directly?”
“It’s been considered, but there are issues. Namely, containment doesn’t seem to survive the transition . . . and it fails quite early in the process.”
“Ouch. I do not want to know how they figured that out,” Steph admitted, taking another drink.
“Why do you think the Rogues don’t transition with their guns loaded?” Eric laughed wryly.
“Well, there has to be something,” Steph said. “What about drones?”
“Huh? What about them?”
Drones were illegal for military use on Earth by international treaty. That was part and parcel of the events that led directly to the Block War, with later-era terrorist acts having been managed via the power of readily available military drones that had made it to the open market. After decades of successful drone use, the old American forces found themselves on the wrong side of small, armed Chinese and Indian drones that had been sold to various countries and then eventually found their way into private hands.
They were the very devil itself to spot, let alone kill, and could pack enough of a punch to take out a ship or building on the small side, with some carrying between two and four seeking missiles in addition to their inherent kamikaze capacity. Getting that market under control had become a major factor in having drone use outlawed for international conflicts under a set of treaties signed in Geneva and Copenhagen.
That didn’t mean that armed drones didn’t exist, of course. The Odysseus, and previously the Odyssey, carried carnivore drones, which were quite well armed, but they certainly didn’t pack enough of a punch to take on an Imperial cruiser.
“Well, they don’t need an atmosphere,” Steph said, “so could we pack a transition cannon on a drone, and maybe a few charges for it to fire? In a vacuum, it shouldn’t matter if containment fails, unless I’m missing something?”
“Huh.” Eric sat back, thinking. “That might work. I’ll talk with engineering about it and maybe they can work something out. Not likely to be enough, but I’ll take anything I can get right about now.”
Steph nodded, knowing that Eric wasn’t there for answers. Not really. He’d take them if he could get them, but no, the reason he was there was because he needed to blow off steam before he could go back out and spit in the face of the inevitable.
He didn’t get that way often, but on occasion the pressure was too much, even for Raze.
“The E is being deployed to my command,” Eric said after a moment of silence.
“Well, we could use the reinforcements,” Steph offered.
“Yeah, I know, we need them, but they’re not equipped for this.”
“Raze, they’re Black Navy, same as we are. They want to be out here. They need to be where they can do the most good. You remember that, right?” Steph asked, leaning forward off the edge of his bed. “That need?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
Steph took a breath. “Then remember this too. Our biggest worry, back in the day, was not that we might die. We worried far more that we might die for some useless reason because the brass couldn’t get their heads out of their asses and spend our lives properly. You’re the brass out here, Raze. I know it, everyone on board knows it . . . and now you’ll show the crew of the Big E why the rest of us don’t worry about that anymore.”
He paused. “Spend our lives properly, Raze, and in exchange we’ll ride with you to hell and back.”
Eric smiled wanly. “Not sure we’re coming back.”
“Then we’ll take that fucking place over and retire there.”
Ranquil
Tanner walked along the path at the top of the massive pyramid that was the home for over a billion people, three other similar structures catching the setting sun in the distance as he looked on at the panoply of color and beauty on display. The deep black of the Priminae construction material absorbed energy from the sun, powering much of the inner structures and sending energy on to those who lived in the city that existed all around him. That made the angled obsidian shapes of the buildings contrast against the color of nature beyond in a way that mirrored the conflict that existed in his mind.
When he had first learned the nature of Central, Tanner had felt betrayed.
He had lived on, and served, the world of Ranquil his entire life, periods away on patrols notwithstanding. To him, Central had been a servant. An unthinking machine, created by ancestors at some time in the past. He had spent many hours in the facility they had assumed was the core of the Central archive, requesting historical details, blueprints, even permission to acquire new land grants. That no one could find records of its construction, or specifications, well, that was merely appropriate security.
The fact that a newcomer to the world, hero or not, was exposed to the truth so quickly upon arrival had left a sharp stabbing sensation deep in Tanner’s chest.
Eric Weston was his friend, but for those few instants, Tanner almost believed that he hated the man.
The feeling passed, of course. Blaming Eric for the actions of Central would be like blaming him for the actions of the Drasin. He had nothing to do with either, other than being present at the right time to make a difference.
That he kept it a secret, apparently even from his own people, was somewhat different, but Tanner could understand the reasoning. Certainly, he doubted that he would have believed such a story . . . and he had to admit, even when presented with the truth . . . Tanner had no clue what he could do with it.
So for now the world had changed, but in such a way that he could not truly find a way to take advantage of.
Change seemed the only constant left in Rael Tanner’s life and the lives of the Priminae people.
Sheltered by those who serve, Rael thought as he looked out over the megacity, and those who died. So few here have any idea just how much the universe has changed in the last few years.
Of course, that wasn’t really fair.
The universe hadn’t changed. It had just decided, in i
ts infinite wisdom, that the time had come for the Priminae people to see its true nature, or a facet of that nature. The universe was not the quiet home they all believed. It was a roiling, uncaring expanse . . . that contained more horror for those who lived in it than it did comfort. Some of that horror was beautiful, but it was all lethal.
Rael despaired that his culture, his people, could continue to exist as they had for millennia in the revelation of such reality.
The entity known as Central to the people of the Priminae found itself considering the implications of change, its thoughts echoing those of the small-statured man who commanded the defense forces for the world and colonies.
The universe was a large place, so massive in nature that even a being as long-lived and deeply enculturated in the depths of infinite variance as Central was only had a passing concept of just how vast it might be. Frame of reference and context defined how one saw the universe, and Central was honest enough to know that his frame of reference was, in some ways, more limited than that of a passing human like Eric Weston, who could directly experience multiple worlds and cultures.
The Empire was a concern, though less of one than most of the local humans might believe.
What worried Central was deeper than that. It was the force behind the actions of the Empire.
Something about the actions associated with this Empire did not ring true to his experience, which ran back farther than most would believe. A guiding force was at play, or so it seemed to Central, a force that was making the Empire choose paths of action . . . less than optimal.
The Drasin were a foolish path of action to take, by any measure. Certainly, a particularly stupid decision there might be ascribed to human insanity, but there had been more inscrutable decisions that made little sense. Central saw a pattern of action influenced by factors beyond his current understanding.
That concerned him more than the Empire itself.
Factors that could not be identified were factors that might hold supremely nasty surprises for himself and the Priminae.
CHAPTER 11
AEV Bellerophon, Deep Space
