by Evan Currie
Steph was grinning from the command deck of his lead fighter, knowing he looked like a loon but not caring in the slightest. He was flying again, and this was no tera-ton warship. It was a fighter.
Milla’s flight interface was something very different as well.
He floated in the center of the command deck, suspended by some manipulation of the counter-mass fields within the ship, every flight control of the fighter literally a thought away through the NICS interface. It was like coming home, in a way, but the new generation was alien too.
Milla’s team had done away with the needles of the original neural induction control system. Now the controls were linked to his neurological system through a pad fitted over the back of his neck up to the base of skull. More comfortable by far but also—and far more importantly—bidirectional.
He could feel the breeze on his face, stellar radiation washing over him as the fighter sped through the black. The few bits of particulate that weren’t trapped and spun off by the fighters’ warp fields were like bugs striking him while he rode his motorcycle on Earth.
The fighter wrapped around him was humming with his own eagerness as his every thought was almost instantly translated into action.
“Milla, you are a wonder,” Steph said firmly. “I am never getting over this. You’ve given me something that I’ve dreamed about, but I never even quite understood what the dreams meant.”
“And I am gratified that you like the results of our work, Steph.” Milla’s voice came over the comm. “However, please do keep an eye on our destination. We’re approaching the rendezvous location.”
Steph’s eyes flicked to the HUD floating in front of him, and he nodded. “Roger that, Commander Chans. Have a look for any sign of our target, then passive scans only.”
“Aye Commander,” Milla said. “Passive scans only.”
They were performing the first true field operations for the newly formed squadron and running the final tests for some of the more esoteric systems that had been folded into the hulls. Much of that could only be done under true field conditions, so Steph had opted to begin their mission with light duty scouting.
Before that could really be done, however, they needed more intel.
A lot more intel.
And right then, the best intel available to them came from only one place.
“Target located,” Milla said. “Adjust course to Four Niner Three, Mark Negative Two. Distance to target . . . eighty light-minutes. Slow down, Steph.”
“Roger, braking maneuvers initiated.”
The squadron followed his lead, bleeding off pure speed quickly while their warp drives captured the high-energy particulate they’d picked up moving through interstellar space and stored as much as possible of it in their fuel cells. The rest was spilled off in random directions, both to reduce their signature to any observers but also to avoid accidentally irradiating the hell out of whatever might eventually cross the path had they allowed the energy to continue on its way unfiltered.
The six fighters dropped below light-speed, bleeding the last of their Cerenkov radiation at the same time, and wheeled about in a long, slow arc that brought them to an intercept course with a lone destroyer that had been sitting out in the middle of deep space.
Waiting.
“Signal for you, Steph.”
“Put it through.”
“Archangel Lead,” a voice said firmly. “Autolycus Actual.”
“Go for Archangel Lead, Autolycus,” Steph replied.
“Welcome to the black,” Captain Morgan Passer said warmly. “We’ve prepared an intelligence briefing for you, and you are cleared for landing on bays two through four.”
“Roger, Autolycus Actual. Thanks for the welcome. Archangel Lead has the ball on approach.”
Autolycus, Command Deck
Morgan Passer examined the inbound “fighters” with interest as they made their approach to land in the docking bay of the Autolycus. His ship was the smallest class fielded by Earth, or it had been. He wasn’t sure if these fighters counted or not.
May as well call them what they are, because they’re not fighters, Passer thought. They’re gunboats.
“They are fast,” his second in command, Daiyu Li, said from beside him. “Their acceleration curve is . . . remarkable.”
“Oh?” Morgan glanced over.
That statement, from her, held a wealth of meaning. Li was a Chinese officer from the Eastern Block, assigned to the Auto specifically because she was an expert on the space-warp drive.
The woman nodded firmly. “They dropped from several hundred times light to less than one-third in . . .” She glanced at the numbers. “Just under sixty-three seconds. That level of acceleration, were we capable of it, would tear this ship apart.”
“Well, someone’s made some improvements,” Morgan said. “That’s a good thing, Commander.”
She nodded absently, mind clearly still awash in the numbers she had called up.
“Yes. Likely a big part is the smaller size and mass,” Li said. “It would be easier to create a stable warp bubble for a smaller design like that. Still, it exceeds previous calculations significantly. Impressive.”
“Fighters secured, Captain,” the officer on deck watch announced, catching their attention.
“Excellent. Signal Commander Michaels that he and his squadron commanders should meet in briefing room three.” Then Morgan added with a grin, “The rest may avail themselves of our facilities, such as they are.”
“Aye Skipper.”
Lacking the mass and power for artificial gravity put much of the destroyer in free fall, so Steph followed their Marine guide through the central corridor, his hand wrapped around the transit grip as it pulled him forward from the bays toward the foredecks where the briefing rooms were.
They were passed by other crew flashing by in the opposite direction, and occasionally by some who were moving perpendicular through accessways that would take them to upper or lower decks. Steph hadn’t spent much time on Rogue Class destroyers, which meant he was plenty glad to have a Marine leading the way.
I’d have gotten lost for sure.
“Slowing now, sirs, ma’ams,” the Marine said just as the grips they were holding onto began to decelerate, causing them to swing forward and hold tight to keep from continuing on at full speed right into the wall at the end of the corridor.
They came to a stop near a vertical access and, one by one, slid up the tube to the next deck up.
“Right this way,” the Marine said, guiding them through the ship until they reached the briefing room.
“Ah, welcome, Commander.”
“Captain Passer, sir,” Steph said firmly, abruptly conscious of the fact that he could hardly manage to stand to attention in zero gravity and that his attempt at a salute was most certainly sloppy as hell.
Morgan ignored this, though his return salute was far crisper. He gestured to the computer display that took up the center of the room.
“We received orders ahead of your arrival,” Morgan said, indicating the information already on display. “So we prepared a quick brief. More in-depth information, including all the minutiae we’ve managed to gather, will be delivered to your ship computers.”
“Thank you, sir. Grateful for the work.”
“Anything that gives us an edge in this,” Morgan said, waving off the thanks. “As you can see, Imperial space is far larger than we originally projected. We’ve only mapped a fraction of it, but we’re already talking about thousands of stars, potentially dozens of habitable worlds, and at least thirty that we’ve confirmed.”
Steph whistled softly. “That is worrying. With Priminae manufacturing techniques, they can certainly put a lot more in the field than we might have considered just a few years ago. Our own Forge is coming online now, but it’ll be some time before it reaches full production capacity.”
Morgan nodded. “That would be why I’m glad to do anything that gives us an edge. If I might ask, w
hat is your mission profile?”
“Intelligence gathering and infiltration,” Steph responded. “A little more in the open than your remit, if possible.”
Morgan nodded slowly, eyes half-closed as he thought about the commander’s words. Steph silently waited for the captain to assemble his thoughts.
“I might have an entry vector for you, in that case,” Morgan said after a moment.
“That would be nice,” Steph said candidly. “I expected we’d be hunting around for a good introduction for a while.”
“We’ve discovered nonaffiliated stars in addition to the Imperial worlds,” Morgan said, gesturing to highlight a slice of space. “This appears to be a section of a half dozen or more minor polities. Two, three star systems for the most part . . . as best we can tell anyway. They’re constantly in conflict with one another, usually trading minor colonies back and forth. A word of warning, though: we monitored an Imperial Fleet heading in their direction not long ago.”
Steph looked over the data. “That might be exactly what we need. Thank you for this, Captain.”
“Just make good use of it, Commander.”
“I fully intend to,” Steph said, a slightly feral gleam in his eyes as he hummed under his breath.
Yo-ho, yo-ho . . .
Outer Reaches, Past Imperial Space
The last beams finished crossing space. Fires burned in sparsely dotted sections of the star system as Jesan Mich presided over the end of the fighting with a careful eye.
The locals had put up a decent fight, he decided as he evaluated the battle that had just wrapped up. They had been entirely outmatched, of course, but they were improving their tactics and strategies.
That may become a problem if left unchecked, Jesan thought.
He would report his observations when he returned to Imperial space and ensure that a few elements were assigned to disrupt the militaries of the local pocket empires. Keeping them fighting one another would prevent any significant buildup that might threaten Imperial forces more effectively than sending in a fleet every so often to knock them back down a few pegs.
“Damage reports,” he demanded, turning away from the scene on the displays.
“We lost three vessels, Fleet Commander,” his second responded instantly. “Multiple ships were damaged, of course, none critically. Repairs are already underway.”
“Good work,” Jesan said, stepping down from the strategic command section. “See to the preparation for our next encounter with the local forces. I’ll be in my quarters.”
“On your order, Fleet Commander.”
Jesan sighed as he slumped in a seat, looking over the information on his personal display with disdain.
This sort of work was beneath him, but he had little choice but to see it through or die in the attempt. The outer-reach empires were nuisances at the worst, constantly fighting one another if they weren’t tangling with some Imperial force or another.
A recent example of that was responsible, in part, for Jesan’s current assignment.
Someone had gotten a few of the kingdoms working together, and they’d been stirring up trouble in the outer reaches. They were neither powerful enough nor stupid enough to come after the Empire, but they had been tearing the ever-living hell out of a few of the other local star systems.
That was a problem because it created a surplus of people with little to nothing to lose and a lot of anger to burn. Most of it might be directed at the current enemies causing problems, but memories were long, and more than a few remembered the Empire and its involvements in their affairs.
One of those groups had struck at the Imperial colony of Hira at a system a few dozen light-years closer to the Empire’s core. Of course, such a move could not be ignored and left without reprisal.
It had taken months to track down where the attack had come from, and still the intelligence they had wasn’t particularly firm. No matter. Someone had to pay—otherwise the Imperial citizenry would get upset and start causing trouble—so the Empire destroyed three metropolis-sized cities within a week of the attack and declared public victory. Jesan’s current assignment was merely to deliver a message to the likely guilty parties while bolstering public confidence that the fleet was on the job to defend their way of life and the great benefits they enjoyed as free citizens of the Empire.
Hopefully he’d get at least some of the actual villains with his campaign, but if not—well, sooner or later they’d get what was coming their way.
In the meantime, Jesan had a job to do.
Chapter 10
Deep Black
Without using the transition drive—Earth’s singular ace in the hole in terms of strategic deployment—travel between stars was downright boring, Steph decided as he stood watch in the control room of a tin can moving almost a thousand times the speed of light. His new commands were capable of transition, of course, but using it would potentially reveal that they were more than they wanted to appear. Thus he was limited to merely hundreds of times the speed of light.
Hurtling through space at such insane speeds was something few people could possibly understand, simply because no human mind would ever be willing to comprehend just how dull it was. At the current speeds they were moving, crossing the galaxy was still a trip seventy years long.
The space-warp drive did open up the local arm of the galaxy to exploration, but in terms of logistical movement for military purposes, the accessible range was much smaller.
Steph couldn’t imagine how it was that the Empire managed to wage wars as it apparently did, not with such a slow rate of travel among its forces. It was one thing across a span of a couple dozen light-years, but even a hundred light-years would mean a logistical bottleneck the likes of which he didn’t even want to imagine.
Being stuck on the wrong side of a month-long supply train is insanity.
It was an interesting problem, actually, and one that Steph had been working on for some time, partly out of curiosity and partly from the belief that understanding the Empire’s limitations would be vital. He’d not expected to need the research quite so directly as it was turning out, but he was happy to have done it.
If he’d been planning such maneuvers, he’d have gone back to the examples set by ancient armies, who’d often done their work with even longer supply lines. Of course, their successes had been hit-or-miss, with victory often depending more on how good their logistics were than how brilliant their commander was in battle. Or, in fact, the brilliance of a commander was often measured by how well he managed logistics rather than soldiers.
The trouble was that those ancient campaigns often rested on the forces being able to acquire material support along the path of their march: buying, raiding, or confiscating food and supplies.
And, while their information on Imperial movements was incomplete, there was no sign that they were engaging in such operations during their encroachment into Priminae and Terran territories. That bothered him deeply, because running a military operation without a strong logistics train should be tantamount to suicide . . . and yet the Empire had apparently done just that, and been doing it in that way for some time if all the information they had was correct.
However they think, or know, they can pull that logistical nightmare off, we don’t have the luxury of even considering the same. We need that logistical support, and we need it in the worst possible way, or we’re going to just shrivel up and die before the Empire gets around to steamrolling us.
Steph examined the star charts supplied to him by the crew of the Auto, noting what they’d discovered. For the moment he put aside the Imperial stars, though those were his ultimate goal. For the immediate future, however, he was more focused on the small, independent polities that existed around the periphery of the Empire.
While looking for Imperial targets, Passer and the Auto had discovered over a dozen small empires that were seemingly at war with one another. Their existence was likely to be a vital component to any future war-fighti
ng strategies, but Steph knew without a doubt that they were absolutely critical to any plans he might make.
He tapped one particular star with a finger, noting that it was the farthest from Imperial space, and also one of the weakest of the independent empires. According to the intelligence from the Auto, the polity called itself the Star Kingdom and was constantly losing shipping between its few colonies to what was ostensibly piracy.
More likely thinly veiled privateer forces, if not out and out regulars, Steph thought, but the thefts provided him with the opening he’d been hoping for.
His squadron wasn’t suited for pretending to be merchantmen, disguised as Q-Ships or not. It was, however, a good match for a pirate fleet, albeit a small one. That didn’t quite fit with what he was hoping to pull off, however.
A privateer force, working counterpiracy actions—that fit perfectly.
A soft alarm drew Steph’s attention away from his work. He rose to his feet and walked over to the flight interface. Stepping into the system, he took control of the ship back from the computer as the surrounding room changed into the tactical command mode.
Black space surrounded Steph as he glanced around the proximity of the ship for a moment before turning his focus to the source of the alarm. The system had registered an anomaly in the expected path of the vessel as they approached the target, Orange Dwarf System.
Is that a Rogue planet?
Steph frowned, but he didn’t want to do any detailed scans for fear of alerting the locals in the nearby system of their presence. That meant he had to wait for the light-speed data to filter in.
The gravity system had picked up the signal of the object, but there was still nothing on visual scanners. Steph flicked through the frequencies, letting out a sound of surprise when he got a hit on infrared.
