by M. D. Cooper
“Sure,” Jessica replied as she took in an appreciative look at Cheeky’s ass. “Find something that covers more than just a few square centimeters, will you? Sera says these Transcend types are prudes.”
Cheeky paused at the bridge’s entrance and looked back at Jessica with a raised eyebrow. “I can cover up no problem. What are you going to do, doll-girl?”
“I can dress down.” Jessica shrugged.
Finaeus snorted. “I’ve been on this ship for weeks and I find both your statements dubious at best. Not that I’m complaining. It’s not often I’m in the company of such fine women.”
Cheeky laughed and left the bridge, while Jessica slipped into the pilot’s seat. She initiated a flight-control systems analysis and glanced down at herself.
In the Inner Stars, her lavender skin and hair barely drew a moment’s notice. Even her exaggerated proportions were not extreme compared with many of the men and women she had seen.
Still, all her clothing was tight, revealing, or both—usually both. Could the Transcend really be so uptight that these simple physical tweaks were frowned upon?
“Was Sera pulling our leg about how uptight things are in the Transcend?” Jessica asked Finaeus.
“Transcend is a big place,” he said with a shrug. “There are places where people have completely done away with physical bodies, places where they’ve turned themselves into weird dolphin things and live in oceans. But at Airtha, and where the military is concerned? Yeah, I’d say she’s not far off.”
“Don’t tell Cheeky about the places with the dolphin-people. She’s going to want to see how they are between the sheets…or the kelp…whatever.”
Finaeus laughed. “I’ll keep it to myself, but I suspect that there is little in this galaxy that Cheeky has not sampled.”
Jessica shook her head. On that subject she was in complete agreement with Finaeus.
USURPED
STELLAR DATE: 07.22.8938 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: TSS Regent Mary, Near Gisha Station
REGION: DSM Ring, Grey Wolf System
Admiral Krissy slipped the final button into its hole at her collar and tugged on her uniform’s jacket to ensure it was straight. She adjusted one of her ribbons and nodded. That would do nicely.
Finaeus…Finaeus was a handful on the best of days. She wanted him to remember how things stood, and who was in charge when they met.
Krissy frowned, wondering what reason Lloyd would have to reach out to her personally. Perhaps it was to request a change of docking location for the Sabrina. He probably wouldn’t like that she had given the starfreighter an interior hub berth.
Keep your enemies close, and all that.
Krissy wasn’t surprised he would say that. Lloyd preferred things to stay the same—exactly the same—forever. Even her coming in early—with or without a foreign ship—would have upset him.
Lloyd shook his head in her mind.
“Shit,” Krissy swore aloud. Grey Division was the last thing she wanted to deal with right now.
“Civilians,” Krissy said with a sigh as she leaned against her cabin’s bulkhead and closed her eyes for a moment.
Although, she’d take civilians any day over dealing with Grey Division.
No one—at least no one that she knew—had a clue exactly who Grey Division reported to. Their official title was the 137th Division of Space Force Strategic Research, but few believed that their core mandate was research.
The consensus was that they were the military version of The Hand, without the pretense at diplomacy.
Hemdar gave the mental equivalent of a snort.
Krissy pushed herself off the wall, gave her uniform a final tug, and palmed her cabin’s door open.
Outside, a pair of lieutenants, followed by a commander, rushed down the hall on their way to duty stations for shift rotation. They stopped and stood at attention as she exited her cabin, and she gave them a nod which set them back in motion.
She turned left, toward the Regent Mary’s bow, where the bridge lay—not on the bow, of course, but far enough away from both the engines and the ship’s nose to offer some modicum of safety in battle.
That was what she liked about the Mary—she was a safe ship. Not the largest in her fleet, nor the most well-armed, but the safest. The Mary had seven layers to her hull, and every bulkhead bore additional reinforcement.
It wasn’t that Krissy was a coward. Far from it. She had flown in a combat drop just last year. However, when she was commanding a fleet, when all those lives depended on her making the right call, then she wanted to be safe.
She climbed the ladders up two levels to the command deck, where she passed by the entrance to the CIC and her offices. There was nothing in either that demanded her attention at the moment—the bridge would be where she could best observe and control whatever happened next—which was hopefully nothing.
When Finaeus had arrived nine days ago, demanding access to the jump gate for a speedy return to Airtha, Krissy had wondered what his intentions really were—if there was one thing she knew about Finaeus, it was that he rarely revealed or stated his true goals—she had witnessed that first hand time and time again.
Nevertheless, whether she turned him away or sent him to Airtha—on his ship or hers—she needed to bring him down to Gisha. If for no other reason than to see him once more. Out of necessity—certainly not desire—she had also reported his arrival to the Admiralty.
She’d known they would be annoyed that the President’s brother had finally reemerged, but to send in a Grey Division ship to pick him up? She had always suspected there was more to his exile than the brotherly spat born out of his crazy rantings.
Krissy stepped onto the bridge to a call of, “Admiral on the bridge,” from the ship’s XO, Major Nelson.
She noted the traditional straightening of backs and additional attentiveness that always came once the bridge crew spotted her arrival.
The Mary had a good crew, though sometimes its captain seemed less than professional. Such as now, when he wasn’t present for their final approach.
“Major Nelson,” Krissy nodded as she approached the command station near the back of the bridge.
“Admiral Krissy,” Nelson replied, throwing her a quick salute. “We’re t-minus ninety-three from port. There’s a gravity-berm we have to ride, and then it will be smooth sailing the rest of the way to Gisha.”
“Very good, Major Nelson,” Krissy replied. “And where is Captain Lin?”
“He is in engineering, ma’am. The chief reported an issue in one of the cooling systems that required a reactor shutdown and he wanted to review the problem himself.”
“Hmm,” Krissy grunted.
Hemdar took her me
aning and sent her confirmation that Captain Lin was indeed in engineering inspecting the reactor, while replying on the bridge net,
Krissy stepped to the bridge’s central holotank and pulled up a view of the ship they were spending all this effort on—the Sabrina.
If the ship had shown up without Finaeus aboard, she would have been tempted to blow it to dust and forget she had ever seen it, but Director Sera Tomlinson had passed orders that whoever found the Sabrina was to render whatever assistance it required—up to and including sending it to either Airtha, or New Canaan.
It created a lovely conflict of interest since New Canaan was an interdicted system and there was no way Krissy could allow a ship passage there, no matter what orders The Hand had passed down.
Luckily, Finaeus had asked for a jump to Airtha, which was much less problematic—if it weren’t for the fact that he was in an Inner Stars vessel.
For starters, the Sabrina didn’t even have the bow-mounted Ford-Svaiter mirror required to traverse the jump gate. They would have to retrofit one onto the freighter.
Which assumed that she could even allow such a thing to begin with. An Inner Stars ship gaining jump-gate tech and travelling to Airtha? To the heart of the Transcend? It was unheard of.
The intel on the ship indicated that it was crewed by smugglers and criminals that Sera had picked up during the years of her own exile. There was even a member of the interdicted New Canaan colony aboard—if reports were to be believed. No, there was almost no chance that this ship would ever reach Airtha.
Even less so now that a Grey Division ship was present.
As though he had read her mind, Major Nelson approached the holotank and spoke quietly to Krissy.
“Admiral, I assume you noticed the GD ship?”
Krissy nodded. “Yes, Stationmaster Lloyd saw fit to ruin my morning early and let me know about it.”
“They’re here for him, aren’t they?” Nelson asked.
Krissy raised an eyebrow. “Either that, or me. Which do you think it is?”
The major appeared to not have expected such a caustic response and he nodded wordlessly.
“Someone doesn’t want him to fly into Airtha on that freighter—which isn’t a bad call—but if they think that Finaeus will willingly get on a GD ship, then they’ve another thing coming.”
“How will he stop that from happening?” Nelson asked.
Krissy shook her head. “I have no idea, but if raw cunning ever took a physical form, it would be Finaeus.”
Bes replied.
Krissy used her personal encryption key to unlock the authentication section of the data stream and read the order’s source.
It simply read as originating from the Transcend’s Admiralty, not from any specific person—just like every other order she had ever received from the Grey Division.
She reviewed the orders, and found that they were as she had suspected. Turn over Finaeus to Colonel Bes, extract the Sabrina’s AI, and then send all the humans and AI on the ship to Henover for interrogation.
That part at least made a bit more sense. Fleet Intel at Henover was a far better destination than the Greys. An addendum caught her eye. It noted that if Jessica Keller was indeed aboard the Sabrina, that she was to be sent along with Finaeus with Colonel Bes.
Back to wherever it was the Greys operated out of.
She counted the seconds of silence before Bes replied. It came to fifteen.
Krissy ended the communication and ran a hand through her short hair.
Krissy wasn’t sure, but there was no way she was going to let a colonel walk all over her. That was a short road to having one’s command undermined.
She gave Hemdar a token response as she considered the addendum regarding Jessica Keller, the colonist woman.
The existence and location of the New Canaan colony was a well-kept secret. Even Krissy didn’t know where it was—only that the GSS Intrepid had indeed met with the Transcend’s Diplomatic Corps and been given a world in exchange for their advanced nanotech.
Which was something that still rankled her. Just their nanotech, not their cutting edge picotech, or their stasis shields.
She imagined what the Transcend fleets could do with stasis shields. The Orion Guard wouldn’t last a decade with scale-tipping tech like that in the TSF’s hands. She’d gladly lead the charge to chase them to the edge of the galaxy if need be.
Then they would finally have peace, the first since the FTL wars broke out five-thousand-years ago.
UNDERSTANDING
STELLAR DATE: 07.22.8938 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sabrina, Near Gisha Station
REGION: DSM Ring, Grey Wolf System
"Until now, I had always wondered if the Transcend was a trick," Cargo said in a quiet voice.
"No trick," Finaeus replied. "As your eyes can attest."
Seeing the mining ring up close, Jessica had to agree. It was a thing of wonder—and they were still a quarter AU away.
The Grey Wolf's blueish light took on a much greyer hue as they drew closer to the elliptical plane. Clouds of carbon and oxygen flowed out from the star's surface, swirling in gravitational eddies formed by the orbiting black holes mounted in the ring wrapping around the star.
"How do you even build something like that?" Cheeky asked.
"Do you see any planets around here?" Finaeus smirked. "We tore them down to build the ring and create the mass for the first few black holes. Now there are thirty of them in there, all moving at a few thousand kilometers per second."
"Yeah, but how?" Cheeky asked. "You mined entire planets, and you said before that you've only been mining the star for a few hundred years."
"Oh, how do we make the ring? We put boosters on all the dwarf worlds in the system and smashed them into the system’s two terrestrial worlds. That ejects a lot of material out into space. Out there we use magnetic fields to pull in the ferrous metals, and then charged ES fields to separate the rest. Then into the refineries.
“In the end, we smashed the two terrestrial worlds together to break them apart as much as possible. We built the orbital frames for the black holes, and then created the first few, feeding them the remains of the planets. Once the black holes had enough mass to balance out against hawking radiation loss, it was a simple matter of kicking them in toward the star in a close orbit. They
tore off all the carbon we needed to complete the construction of the ring, and there you have it."
"Just like that," Jessica said with a laugh.
"You saw things like that back in Sol," Finaeus replied. "They did it with Neptune and Uranus. Pulled their clouds right off and fed them into Jupiter."
"That was before my time," Jessica shrugged. "By the time I was alive, Uranus's core was already in orbit of Jupiter, and Neptune was on its way to its new home in the Scattered Disk."
Finaeus shook his head. "Never understood that. Could have mixed it up just right, and fired a compressive antimatter blast around it...would have made a great super-Earth for InnerSol.
"Shows you how much clout Terra had lost by then. The Jovians happily sold it to the Scattered Worlds Alliance—and I guess we found out why," Cargo said.
Jessica nodded wordlessly. It was still difficult for her to think of what had happened to InnerSol at the hands of the Jovians. The only world they’d left habitable inside Ceres’ orbit was Venus.
Five thousand years later, the Jovians had finally cleaned up Earth, but Luna and Mars were both still ruins, their once-great cities, broken and twisted reminders that the Jovians—now known as the Hegemony of Worlds—left for any who would test their might.
Jessica pushed the melancholic thoughts from her mind and focused on the growing form of Gisha Station.
A hub and spoke station, it was the tried and true style that had been in use for thousands of years. Even with inexpensive antimatter on hand, it was still more efficient to spin a station to simulate gravity than run AG systems everywhere.
The holodisplay noted that the station was over a hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter, with two-hundred and thirty-five ships in external berths on the outer ring. Many were easily recognizable as military vessels, though she spotted a small number of ships that appeared to be freighters—likely contractors that supplied the station with goods. Several large ships—nearly large enough to rival the Intrepid—were drifting near the station, likely undergoing refit and repair by the clouds of drones surrounding them.
