by Evan Currie
“Unfortunately not,” Milla said. “The cargo space is too limited, even if we completely emptied all consumables, including weapons—”
“We won’t be doing that,” Steph interrupted hastily.
“Even if we did,” Milla went on, giving him a sour look, “we could not deploy more than a tiny handful of useful drones. The Odysseus requires hundreds to create a reasonable detection grid along even a nominal firing arc. Thousands would be required to defend the entire vessel, and even with those numbers there would be a significant number of potential holes in the detection grid. It simply isn’t possible to do the same with fighters of this size.”
“Pity,” Black offered over the open channel as the two ships headed back toward the Star Forge at a more moderate cruise.
“Yeah, no kidding,” Steph sighed. “But I suppose our strengths are the same as they’ve always been: small, fast, and nimble. Sure, we could be taken out easy enough if you can hit us—but good luck meeting that requirement.”
“That is more or less what I was told when I presented the issues with drones, yes,” Milla answered. “Defensively, this class of fighter is quite impressive by older standards . . . but against a warship? No, there is no armor or defense we could mount that would guarantee survival in that scenario.”
“Never has been,” Black said. “So can’t miss what we never had.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Steph said before he grinned. “Besides, as fast and maneuverable as these are, hitting us just got magnitudes more difficult. Float like a photon, sting like antihydrogen.”
Milla scrunched up her face. “What?”
“Never mind,” Black cut in. “That one would take too long to explain, and it’s not particularly clever anyway.”
Steph pouted the rest of the way back to the Star Forge.
Star Forge Alpha
“How are they looking?”
Commodore Beckett glanced back over his shoulder, nodding to the admiral, before looking back down to the telemetry they were receiving from the two prototype fighters. Gracen was not one to stand on ceremony when there was no reason for it, so he just gestured down to the screens before answering.
“Aside from Michaels being insane? Looking good,” he admitted dryly.
“During the war, the Archangels were known for accomplishing missions no one thought were possible. Crazy comes with the territory,” Gracen replied as she walked up to the display and glanced over the numbers herself. “What did he do that was crazy?”
“See these velocity readings here?”
Gracen nodded. “Right. What about them?”
“He was inside the atmosphere of Mercury at the time.”
The admiral was silent for a long moment, then merely nodded again. “Ah, yes, that would qualify, I suppose.”
She jotted down a note into the system without further comment, attracting the commodore’s curiosity.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Just making sure that the engineering team knows to strip his fighter down to the bare fuselage and measure everything before they let him back out in it,” Gracen told him, wryly amused. “No sense wasting the research possibilities. I dare say he set a new record?”
“Highest velocity inside a planetary atmosphere? Yes ma’am, I checked . . . not that I really needed to.”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t. One more under his belt, I suppose.”
“One more? How many does the man hold?”
“I’d have to look up the records,” Gracen said, “but off the top of my head, I think at least twenty. Commodore Weston holds twice that, if I recall. Most of the high-performance aeronautical records are held by Double A pilots these days, and probably will be forever, since no one is building high-performance aircraft any longer.”
She gestured idly. “Maybe in fifty years a civilian engineering team will put something together that beats the platform just to say they did it, but the Archangels are the last of the high-performance aeronautical pioneers, I think. It’s a starship galaxy now.”
“End of an era?” Beckett asked, amused that the admiral knew even the general stats from memory.
“Some would say so.” Gracen nodded. “Though others would say it’s just the continuation of the old into the new. Records get retired all the time as technical skills march on. Does anyone keep track of who holds steam engine speed records anymore?”
“Actually, they have yearly trials for those at a set of tracks just outside London,” Beckett answered without thinking.
Gracen looked at him, surprised. “Really?”
“Oh yes, it’s a small community but it’s still around,” he confirmed. “I grew up in a borough nearby and used to visit to watch the trains race the clock. Of course, they do steam car races on salt flats in the States, so that’s a different set of records.”
Gracen laughed lightly, shaking her head. “Maybe it’s not the end of an era, then, so much as just shifting gears. I can see Commander Michaels consulting in thirty years on some civilian attempt to break his records.”
“Hopefully not the one he just broke, by my preference,” Beckett said.
“Not in Earth’s atmosphere, at least, though with the use of the counter-mass systems, the Double A platform was quite capable of coming closer than I’m comfortable with.”
“Agreed.”
“Well, inform the commanders and lieutenant that I want reports on my desk as soon as possible,” she said as she straightened up. “We need the fighters in full production as quickly as we can manage.”
“Yes ma’am,” the commodore said before looking around to see if anyone was in earshot. “Ma’am?”
“Yes, Commodore?”
“What are the odds the Empire makes another play soon?”
Gracen shook her head. “I would be shocked to my core if they hadn’t already set their plans in motion, Commodore.”
Beckett nodded slowly. “Aye ma’am, I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“That is why, if the teardown of the commander’s fighter doesn’t show anything unexpected, I’m ordering the system into full production,” Gracen said firmly. “We have a need, and we have the strong political backing of both Earth and the Priminae. I’m pushing everything I can through, as fast as possible.”
“Interesting times,” the commodore said tiredly. “But it’s nice to see things moving quickly. For a while there, after the war, all I could see was the world sinking back into old patterns. Maybe we can avoid that this time?”
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it,” Gracen said with a cynical tone. “Those who do? We’re doomed to watch others repeat it around us while we try to hold things together. So no, I doubt we can avoid the repeating pattern, but maybe we can push it off to another generation.”
“With the new life-extension therapies being made available?” Beckett asked, amused.
“Give me a couple decades, and I’ll take my own ship and find some quiet planet ten thousand light-years from here to retire on,” Gracen said. “Until then, I have a job to do—and so do you.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
Chapter 2
Imperial Capital, World Garisk
“Lord Mich!”
Jesan half turned, barely looking at the person approaching him. “I am a lord no longer.”
He turned to continue on his way, but the woman had caught up to him by that point and fell into step at his side.
“My apologies, Fleet Commander,” she said. “I hadn’t been informed of your loss.”
“The council meeting was only a few days ago,” he said. “I suppose it has not filtered down.”
“Interesting,” she said, something in her tone catching his attention.
“How so?” Jesan asked, glancing at her long enough to get her rank in mind. “Fleet Commander.”
“Fleet Commander Helena Birch, Fleet Commander Mich.” She nodded curtly to him as they walked. “And I merely find it int
eresting that Her Majesty did not mention your loss in her orders to me.”
That almost made Jesan miss a step. He didn’t recognize the name, and a fleet commander shouldn’t be receiving orders directly from Her Imperial Highness in the first place. An untitled military commander would receive orders from a noble of equal or higher military rank.
“You must be with the Eighth,” he said finally, as there was no other real possibility he could imagine. No one else would have met with the empress and then chased him down.
“I must, mustn’t I?” Birch asked with a very slight smile. “I want to speak with you concerning your experiences with the Oathers and their new allies.”
“Her Highness ordered me to your service on this matter.” Jesan gestured ahead of them. “We are nearly to my offices here, or you may choose a place.”
“Your offices would be fine, Fleet Commander.”
Jesan nodded and led the way forward to the newly assigned, and much lesser, offices he had been given in the capital.
Lord Mich’s Office
Helena Birch watched the man who had fallen from grace yet somehow managed to snag a limb on the way down. Few, in her experience, survived such a fall.
Fewer still managed to keep their command, albeit with a rather ugly assignment lined up for the foreseeable future.
She’d read Mich’s file when the empress had given her the assignment, and she hadn’t been lying when she said there had been no mention of his loss of title. Her Highness had not mentioned the change, nor was it in his file, yet as she looked around the offices he had led her to, she knew she was not in a nobleman’s suite.
Curious.
“What would you like to know?” the man asked tiredly as he settled in behind an old desk that was dented and scraped from years of service. He gestured to the equally battered seat that sat across from him.
“I’ve read your analysis of the enemy weapons,” Helena said as she shifted to business, taking the offered seat. “However, there are a great number of holes in the data.”
“Don’t I know it? That is the problem, Fleet Commander. Our intelligence on the Oathers is ten thousand years out of date—not a particular problem with those people, I admit, but their allies? With them, it’s completely nonexistent.”
Helena shook her head, resisting the urge to rant.
It was an ongoing problem, in her opinion, that the Empire didn’t take the time to do proper—if any—intelligence gathering. While groups like her Eighth Fleet did exist, both in the military and within the government, few bothered to listen to what they learned, and even fewer bothered to let people like herself know what they were planning so that she could get the information they might need.
The Empire was the biggest gun in the galaxy, as best they could tell so far, and that had left a great deal of people with the impression that nothing more was required to accomplish Imperial goals than bringing that gun to bear.
It was a costly quirk, but so far had been proven more or less correct.
Now, however, the Empire had been visited with an extremely rare defeat, but far more than that, they’d been struck within their own borders for the first time in centuries. It had been so long, in fact, that Helena had been forced to delve into the archives upon receiving her assignment just to determine if such an act had ever happened.
“I’ve examined all the ship logs and recordings of your encounters,” she said. “The majority of the contacts fit within expected parameters pulled from the archives.”
“I am aware, yes,” Jesan said. “The anomaly, however, first encountered by the Drasin and recorded by my predecessor, should have been a warning to us that something very different was going on.”
Helena nodded. “Indeed. The power curve on that vessel was essentially nonexistent. Were you ever able to determine how they were masking it?”
“If I had, the details would be in the reports,” Jesan assured her dryly. “At best I have guesses, but even those make little sense.”
“I’ll take a guess at this point, Fleet Commander.”
“Call me Jesan,” he said and sighed, settling back as he considered his thoughts. “As to a guess . . . to be honest, there is only one thing that remotely seems reasonable: they’re generating power as they need it and are highly efficient in its use.”
“Generating . . . You mean fusion? That’s antiquated,” Helena objected.
“Possibly fusion, possibly something else.” He nodded. “Whatever technology they use doesn’t register as a power curve to our systems, however, which leaves us with only two options. First, they’re somehow masking their signature, which is impossible, or they’re generating power as needed from base constituents rather than storing it in singularities.”
“The second is certainly possible, but no one does that,” Helena said. “It’s too limited. A singularity core can store entire planetary masses worth of power and be efficiently converted back to useable power at need. There’s simply no way a vessel could match that with any type of old-style reactor.”
“I didn’t say that they did,” Jesan pointed out. “That brings us to the second part of their technical prowess: they’re simply more efficient in power use than we are. I can point to their beam weapons as the perfect example—weapons, I might add, that have affected Imperial designs based on our guesses about their functionality.”
Helena frowned, thinking about that.
He was right, she realized. What little they did know about the anomalous species indicated that they were hyperefficient in power use. The beam weapons they used were noted as being capable of frequency shifts in order to more efficiently vaporize the material they were targeting.
If that were not merely a simple example of their technology, but rather indicative of their philosophy as a species, the fleet commander might well be correct, she realized.
“So possibly a lower technology species, or one with a divergent development,” she said. “But with extreme skill in using what they have? Interesting.”
“That was my conclusion, yes,” Jesan said carefully.
One word caught her ear.
“Was?” Helena asked.
“Their superweapon, what their fleet commander referred to as a ‘strategic weapon’”—Jesan scowled angrily—“that was not old technology, nor particularly efficient. It was brute force unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”
Helena sighed, but had to concede the point.
The enemy superweapon was like nothing any of the archives could boast knowledge of.
Jesan had a haunted look in his eyes, and she could almost see the memories playing out behind them. He sighed after a moment, slumping in his place.
“I still have occasional flashes of that horrendous rage of pure unadulterated power,” he admitted tiredly. “It just appeared from nowhere to flash ships and infrastructure into plasma in an instant. No sign of what cast that power out into the universe, just . . . a raging pillar of flame from nowhere.”
Jesan sounded even more weary, as though each word was almost being torn from him against his will. When he finally fell silent again, Helena leaned in closer.
“The enemy fleet commander—did you notice anything when he spoke to you?”
Jesan shrugged. “Very little of use I expect. He was well disciplined, despite holding fear and anger in check . . .”
Jesan frowned, thinking back. “And disdain. A lot of disdain.”
Helena’s eyes widened almost imperceptibly. It wasn’t uncommon, in her experience, for a non-Imperial to hold the Empire in disdain, but it was rare that an Imperial lord would deign to notice it.
“How so?”
Jesan laughed bitterly. “He informed me that he was conducting a lesson in the proper application of strategic weapons, right before he annihilated our bases. His tone was such as I might use when instructing a junior officer in how to properly cleanse his quarters before an inspection. As though he knew I was too stupid to understand what he was uttering, b
ut it was his duty to impart the lesson either way.”
Helena managed to bury her amusement. It wouldn’t do to show such emotions; doing so would likely irritate her source, which was counterproductive, and of course it would also be in rather bad taste given how many people and resources that “lesson” had wiped out.
Even so, she couldn’t help but ask, “Did you learn the lesson he was teaching?”
Jesan stared at her for a moment before barking with self-deprecating laughter. “I rather doubt I did, Fleet Commander. I hadn’t even thought much on it until now.”
Helena nodded silently but didn’t comment further.
His words did not surprise her.
Imperial Palace, Empress’ Private Reception
“You were correct in your assessment of the man,” Helena said some time later, casually lounging in a comfortable settee as the empress stood across the room, examining herself in the mirror.
“I normally am,” Her Highness said simply. “Do you have anything to add?”
“Not particularly,” Helena said. “He’s competent, better than most of the imbeciles who are elevated to lordship. Why didn’t you mention that he’d been demoted, by the way?”
Her Highness, Emilia Starsbane, chuckled softly as she looked over her shoulder. “Because a little reminder of his fall was due the man, my mercy on his case notwithstanding. Besides, I expect that he won’t be a fallen lord for long. Either he’ll regain his position or he will die in the attempt.”
“Set that up already, did you?” Helena asked her old friend, the girl she’d grown up with until the day she had gone to join the Imperial Fleets.
“Of course,” Emilia said, scoffing. “But I’m more concerned about these unknown people who’ve allied with the Oathers.”
“There’s nothing on the records that matches anything close to what they’ve fielded,” Helena said, “which implies a separate genesis.”
