by Jean Johnson
“I’d rather indulge in a clear-cut fight, General. More blood upon my hands, but less blood upon my soul. Speaking of which . . .” Drawing her sword, she carefully balanced the blade between her hands. Turning to first the captain, then the general, she let them have a close enough look, but pulled the blade back before Sranna could touch the edge. “Please don’t touch. It’s far sharper than you think.”
“It looks like it’s cheap, chrome-coated plexi up close. There’s even some chipping in the metal coating a short distance from the tip,” Sranna observed.
“That’s because it is coated.” Shifting her grip carefully, mindful of the double, sharp edges, she scraped her fingernail over the blade, peeling back some more of the paint. The patch she revealed was an odd transparent gold, as if the blade were made of glass. “Silver gilt, to make it look like plain steel.”
“What lies underneath?” Sranna asked.
“We don’t know, exactly,” she hedged. At their chiding looks, she shrugged and straightened, blade still cradled lightly in her hands. “It’s a native mineral on my homeworld. Geological, mineralogical, and chemical scientists have been trying to make heads or tails of it since the planet was first accidentally discovered by its colonists. They were supposed to be headed for a heavyworld of 2.73gs, and ended up at Sanctuary instead. Since Sanctuary has an atmosphere, and their original plans were for a dome colony, they decided to settle there instead. That’s when they found this stuff.
“The planet is dusted with patches of giant crystal sprays. Most of them grow in octagonal patterns, with many of the shafts looking almost square and growing as thick as a Human’s thigh or head. But a rare few grow these thin, diamond-shaped shafts. Some of the locals call them Devil’s Sticks, but the official term is crysium.”
Sranna blinked. “I believe I’ve heard of that stuff. It replaced the compound trinium lonsdaleite as the hardest known substance by . . . what, twenty times? Plus there was something about how they couldn’t actually break off a sample, and had to chip off an entire spray to ship it to a lab?”
“Oh, you can break it. You just have to apply pneumatic pressure in excess of several thousand tons to a very, very thin crystal shaft.” Ia hefted her sword. “This is one of the few shafts they broke off when they discovered that. My family acquired one and had it set in a hilt as a sword-blade when they found out I’d been promoted to Company Sergeant—this is why I’ve been diligent in keeping up my sword practices along with my other fighting skills, Captain. More Afaso than Marines-style swordplay, of course,” she added with a shrug. “But then I know more about Afaso style sword-fighting, obviously.”
“And the silver paint?” Sudramara asked, draining his caf’ mug.
“Well, it’s not exactly a standard-shaped Marine saber to begin with,” she said. Touching the tip to the mouth of her scabbard, she slid it home. “I can’t say anyone has figured out how to bend the stuff, yet. As far as the mineralogists are able to tell, each shaft of crysium is a monocrystal . . . a single, solid, flawless crystal . . . and this particular variant has two very acute, monofractal edges.”
“Monofractal?” Sranna asked.
“The crystalline structure is pretty much flawless and uniform in all of its properties, down to the molecular level. Whatever it’s made out of, it’s as strong at the microscopic level as it is at the macroscopic . . . and it is very, very sharp. Put enough force behind a blow, and it will cut through just about anything. Except another crysium blade, but there’s only a handful of those, and the rest are all back on my homeworld,” she allowed. Ia added, shrugging, “Hiding the truth of this blade under the silver-gilt paint is like hiding my native resistance to static shocks. It’s meant, literally, to give me an edge in combat.”
Sranna snorted. “Bad pun, meioa.”
Ia let her sense of humor show through, twisting up the corner of her mouth. “I’ll take any amusement I can find in a situation as grim as this one, sir.”
Sudramara sighed. “Tell me about it. They’ve carted off the lieutenants and sergeants by OTL courier to Zubeneschamali. The far side of Terran space from here. Other-than-light travels at about two seconds to the light-year. FTL an hour to the light-year. We won’t get there in time.”
“Actually . . . we just might. I have some, mm, unusual friends,” Ia offered, spreading her hands a little. She clasped her fingers together in front of her belt, enjoying the bemused looks on the two men’s faces. “One of them managed to get from a sector not far from this one all the way to Zubeneschamali, in an FTL ship, in under five hours. Mind you, it was a somewhat smaller ship than the Liu Ji, but it is possible.”
Captain Sudramara scowled. “Impossible! That’s hundreds ofli light-years away!”
“Impossible . . . if you don’t know the secret to Solarican interstellar travel. Which my friend discovered,” Ia returned calmly. Unbuckling her baldric, she settled into the nearest seat and leaned her sheathed blade against its armrest.
Sudramara gave her a sardonic look. “We know the secret to Solarican-style travel. The TUPSF’s researchers are working on it. We just don’t have the technology to locate and access natural hyperrifts. That . . . and I’m not sure my ship can take it. There are patrols that regularly visit the Zubeneschamali System, and half the Special Forces between here and there. I hate to say this, but they can track down the captain and the rest far better than we can.”
“Track them down, yes . . . but get them back? I don’t think so.” Ia shook her head. “Wherever this Lyebariko is taking them, you can bet it’ll be a fortress. A veritable castle, with the drawbridge lowered and the portcullis raised by invitation only.”
“Castle walls can be breached,” the Navy captain reminded her. “Pull in enough firepower, and their walls will go down. Nobody messes with the Space Force.”
“I would rather not risk my commanding officers being destroyed in the middle of a bombardment, sir,” Ia countered flatly. “I barely lived through one of those myself, and I wasn’t the prisoner of a bunch of madmen at the time.”
“You sound like you have a plan,” General Sranna interjected before the Liu Ji’s captain could argue the matter further. “Let’s hear it.”
“My, ah, friend knows how to calculate the location of one natural hyperrift. It travels from Gliese 226, which is about seven, eight light-years from here, to the outskirts of Zubeneschamali. He and his crew can pinpoint the mouth of the hyperrift for us, and give us the field specifications to wrap our ship in an FTL warp bubble with the right frequency to ‘grease’ the Liu Ji through the tube. He is also . . . the sort of person who could earn an invitation into the enemy’s fortress,” Ia hedged, tipping her head in acknowledgment of the activities being left unsaid. “If he comes bearing the right gift in hand.”
“Gift?” the stout general asked, offering his mug back to Sudramara for a refill.
She shrugged, spreading her hands. “Me. Obviously D’kora can’t go, so it would have to be me. These people went to a lot of trouble, which is now public knowledge, to get a hold of us. My friend could stage a kidnapping of me, and offer me as a ‘gift’ to the underlords of the known galaxy,” Ia told them. “Given his, ah, well-established professional interests and avowed ambitions . . . it’s quite believable that he would offer a prize like me in exchange for access to the Lyebariko, just for a shot at future business dealings with them.”
“And then what?” Sudramara asked, coming back with both mugs freshly refilled. He handed one to the Army general and sat down with the other. “You’re good, Ia. I’ve seen you pull off a lot of things over the months since I took over. But you’re not a one-woman army—whatever the recruitment ads might say.”
“No, but for the right compensation, my friend and his crew could open the castle gates from the inside, while this ‘Library’ of criminal masterminds is busy looking me over. One of their specialties is infiltration and sabotage,” Ia revealed. “Corporate warfare can be just as physically ugly as any mil
itary engagement, and the Lyebariko is just one more business conglomeration to these people.”
“What consideration did you have in mind?” Sranna asked, sipping at his mug.
“If I were you, I’d give him a choice. Upgraded engines and military-class weapons for the ships in his fleet . . .” She had to pause while Sranna choked on his caf’. He coughed and accepted the napkin the captain fetched for him. As soon as he could breathe again, Ia finished her statement. “Or a full and unconditional pardon for every illegal activity he and his crew have ever committed, up to the moment Ferrar and the others are freed and returned to the Space Force . . . and granted on the sole condition that everyone makes it out alive. Provided they’re all still alive when the rescue operation begins, of course.”
“Of course,” Sranna rasped, rapping his knuckles against his barrel-broad chest. “You, Acting Lieutenant, have the biggest pair of planetoids I have ever met. Male or female.”
“Thank you, sir. All we have to do is have the military waiting for the castle gates to open. Even if it’s just a sally port, to continue the analogy,” she acknowledged, “a few on the inside can open things up so that the rest can come pouring in. If we pull this off, we rescue the Captain, the lieutenants, and the sergeants . . . and take down or at least thoroughly disrupt and chastise several arrogant crimelords who think they can mess with the military.
“If we can’t pull it off . . . at worst, you’ll lose myself, the Captain, lieutenants, sergeants . . . and a handful of criminals,” Ia reminded them. “On the bright side, if things go system nadir, you’d still have the military lurking in wait, armed and ready to knock down those castle walls. But no matter what, sirs, we have to show these crimelords that they cannot mess with the Space Force and get away with it. I would just prefer to extract their prisoners first before cracking open their thick heads.”
Sranna mulled over her offer. He sipped at his caf’, finger slowly rubbing his chin. “Can we trust this so-called friend of yours? You’ve admitted he’s as much a criminal as these Lyebariko fellows.”
Rising, she crossed to the caf’ machine and fetched a fresh mug from where she had seen Sudramara fetch the others. “He owes me too much to back out. Plus, I have too much dirt on him, so he can’t back out.”
The general nodded. “I want to meet him.”
“That can be arranged,” she agreed, returning to her seat. “He’s not too far away. Half an hour at most, in a courier ship . . . but he won’t meet us midsystem. It’s too dangerous. I suggest we head out like we’re going back on our regular patrol, send somewhat edited information on the attack on to the rest of the Space Force—because it’s obvious there’s a huge security breach somewhere in the system—and then detour once we’re well beyond the system’s scanning range to TZL 11818.”
Sudramara frowned. “That star’s a little brown dwarf not even half a light-year from here. Hell, it’s practically a black dwarf, it’s so cold and dead. That system doesn’t even have any planetoids, just a few chunks of loose-floating rocks. Which we won’t see until we’re practically on top of them.”
“Which makes it ideal for a rendezvous,” Sranna stated.
“More importantly, it’s not that far off from our patrol route. We can still get to our next port of call on time, which is Tasket Station. At that point, I go ashore as if on Leave, I get kidnapped, my friend whisks me off, you give chase . . . and we meet up again in the depths of untraveled space. He sets up the meeting with the Lyebariko to deliver his gift, you bring his courier on board, squeeze it in next to the shuttles, and we head for Gliese 226,” Ia summed up. “We take the wormhole, drop out at systems edge and dump him out with me on board—the amount of travel time the Liu Ji would spend in transit would probably be roughly the same time it takes for a courier to get there, what with the pauses to recover from OTL hypersickness—and then just wait for the hook and bait to do their job.”
“And then we just wait for the Trojan Horse to open the fortress gates and be rolled inside.” Saluting her with his mug, Sranna nodded. “This just might work. They did their damnedest to take you, too, so you should be the bait we need.”
“What if your ‘friends’ can’t get the gates open quickly enough?” Sudramara asked her. “What if they torture you, or the others?”
“They could be doing that right now to Captain Ferrar and the rest,” she pointed out in return. “It’s a risk we all have to take. The Lyebariko has declared war on the Space Force—specifically, on Ferrar’s Fighters. I want to prove to them, and to the rest of the undergalaxy, that they made a very serious mistake.”
“I don’t know,” Sudramara murmured. “The few cases of FTL ships falling into natural hyperrifts often ended with those ships badly damaged by the end. Your world’s colonists being a case in point. They had no choice but to pick your planet, because they couldn’t get back out of the system again, and I think, what, couldn’t use the hypercomms until they were repaired a few months later? I don’t know if I can risk that kind of damage happening to this ship. As much as I want Captain Ferrar and the others brought safely back, it’d be my career on the line.”
“Well, there is one more, and a very important, factor to consider,” Ia murmured, knowing she had to have the conservative captain on her side to pull this off. “The morale of every man and woman remaining on this ship. Navy as well as Marines. Your crew likes our Company. You know we’d be riding to your rescue if they’d struck you down during your greenroom party. Both halves of this ship know it.”
Sudramara wrinkled his nose. “Don’t remind me. We were supposed to go see the second show. Now it’s been cancelled.” He sipped at his caf’, then sighed. “Unfortunately, you’re right. My crew would mutiny if they knew about this chance for payback and heard I’d turned my back on it. Provided you, sir,” he added to General Sranna, “are willing to cover my pay cheque on any repair bills to this ship. And we’re going into this on the Zubeneschamali side with as much backup as we can muster. Discreetly muster.”
“I’ll cover this mission, and see what help we can get,” Sranna asked. “Discreetly, but you’ll need whatever help you can get.”
“I’m happy to hear you say that, sir,” Ia muttered, draining her own caf’. “I know very well I’m not a one-woman army. I’ll go set things up for that meeting. The sooner this gets done, the better off we’ll be.”
CHAPTER 19
The incident involving the kidnapping of Captain Ferrar and the others has been exaggerated in many ways. Some things were correct, however. Did I consort with known criminals in order to get the job done? Yes, because it caused many more known criminals to be put out of business. Did I cut some of my foes literally into three pieces, like the song suggests? Some of them, yes, but they were trying to kill me at the time, so I figured it was only fair. Did I rip off the leg of a K’katta and beat him to death with it? . . . No comment.
The whole operation was a gamble, and we knew it going in. It helped that we released the falsified news that our captives had died without revealing any information, made sure the touring cast was safe, and supposedly took off on the rest of our patrol. Being captured at the next station, well . . . that was staged to look quite real. A little too real in some ways, but it did work as intended.
~Ia
MARCH 30, 2492 T.S.
SYSTEM EDGE
GLIESE 226 SYSTEM
. . . NOT TZL 11818
The first thing on her mind when she woke up was the nasty taste in her mouth. The second thing was the words that came out of that mouth. “Did you have to use that particular drug?”
Heddle, Drek’s medic, shifted to the other bed in the cramped cabin, his attention on the hypospray he picked up from the tray on the counter by the door. “That particular drug can be counteracted quickly. In fact, it wears off naturally after OTL transit, which we have just finished achieving. The shot I gave you should clear your mind. Other choices . . . would have delayed your mission.”
What she saw there made her wince. Betrayal was a high probability. The little addition to their plans would complicate her correction of the problem. Oh . . . stupid, stupid . . . stupid.
“I am curious about the strange bracelet on your right wrist,” Heddle murmured. “We of course had to leave your military unit behind so you couldn’t be easily traced, but this other thing . . . it has me curious. Particularly as we could find no hinges, catches, or seams.”
“Be curious all you want,” Ia dismissed. She smacked her mouth and grimaced, then lifted her chin at Drek. “How soon until he’s on his feet?”
Still not looking at her, he applied the hypospray to his boss, who was dressed to look like conservative, polite businessman Darroll Rekk-Noth, occasional, casual date of Sergeant Ia of the TUPSF Marines over the last several months. “A minute.”
The bald-headed medic—not quite a doctor—returned the hypo to the tray on the counter near the door and busied himself with some minor tidying. Within moments, Drek groaned softly, and shifted a hand to his head.
“. . . I hate that drug. Water,” he ordered, lifting his hand from the makeshift exam bed.
The medic fetched him a bottle of water from the cooler, but not one for her. That confirmed what Ia had read in the timestreams. The crew already knew.
She needed to clear the drugs from her system, some of which were not the same ones Drek had received. But discreetly. Glancing around, she spotted a power socket at the head of the bunk. Sighing, Ia stretched out, draping her right arm over her head. That conveniently placed the thick, golden-clear bracelet cuffed seamlessly around her right wrist right next to the conduit outlet. “Can’t wait for my head to clear . . .”
