by Peter Nealen
“The Unity is moving, and it does appear that they are stirring up as much trouble as possible to prevent any organized resistance from developing to stop them. And that is where our mercenaries come in.”
He put his hands flat on the table. “As I said, they are being as cooperative as possible, while simultaneously trying to dodge as much responsibility as they can. They claim they do not know exactly who the broker is, but that he offered a considerable sum in rare metals, along with the materiel they used here, to ‘advise’ the Exiles. True to Yerok’s Irregulars, they didn’t ask many details, just what they would be expected to do. Personally, I suspect they heard the price and immediately agreed, no questions asked. All in all, not terribly helpful. Except for one detail.” He looked around the table with what might have been a glint of amusement in his eyes. “They said that they met the broker on Ktatra.”
Scalas raised an eyebrow. Rokoff was impassive. Soon straightened in his chair.
Costigan, however, let out a gusty snort. “So,” he said, “we’ll only be searching for another fifty years, then.”
He paused suddenly, staring at the faintly amused look on Maruks’s face. “Unless…”
Maruks smiled tightly and nodded, touching another key. Another star blinked in the holo tank, far on the edge of the Avar Sector, well to spinward and deep within the Zagreus Nebula. “As I said, they are being very cooperative.”
“They must be desperate,” Soon said, “if they are spilling Ktatra’s coordinates. We’ve only been looking for that den of thieves for the better part of a century. Every captured crew has been too afraid of the pirates’ retribution to say a word, even in custody.”
“They are indeed,” Maruks said. “I think they are afraid of facing a firing squad, and rightfully so. The Regonese are not happy. Some of the flock leaders are openly calling for their rather slow, painful deaths. Because of them, a war that had been contained for nearly a Regonese century flared up again and millions died. It is not lost on the flock leaders that, if the Exiles’ math had been slightly more precise, it could have ended even more catastrophically than it did, either. The Regonese are not in a merciful mood, and the mercenaries know it.”
He zoomed the holo tank in on the Zagreus Nebula. A twisting, writhing cloud of green and blue, it looked like a surreal, wind-sculpted thundercloud, only one that was three hundred light-years across. The view zoomed in farther, passing by glowing points of stars and protoplanetary discs toward the blinking indicator that was Ktatra.
Costigan let out a low whistle. “That’s going to be fun.”
The interstellar pirate haven known as Ktatra was somewhere within a protoplanetary disc circling a young star, deep within the nebula. The sky was a weird morass of dust and blue and green gases, and the disc was a thick ring of dust, asteroids, ice, and knots of growing protoplanets gathered around the early-sequence star.
“You’re not wrong,” Maruks said. “We have a general profile for Ktatra’s orbit, but finding it in that mess is still going to be difficult. And we will have to proceed with the utmost caution, as well. We don’t want to spook our quarry before we can snatch them up.”
He looked around the table. “What is your refit status?” he asked.
“The Dauntless and Century XXXII can be ready to lift in seventy hours, sir,” Scalas reported.
Maruks nodded, apparently satisfied. “And the rest? About the same?”
He got more nods. “Yes, Brother Legate,” Soon and Rokoff chorused.
Maruks stood. The others followed. “Good,” he said. “We lift for Ktatra in seventy-two hours.”
Scalas had just gotten back aboard the Dauntless when the alert sounded. A bell rang stridently, echoing through the ship’s decks, and Scalas headed for the command deck at a run.
He burst out to find Mor and most of the command crew at their stations, the holo tank lit. “We have company,” Mor told him, after twisting around in his couch to see who had just barged onto the command deck. “A full thirty ships just went inert ten light-seconds out from the planet.”
Scalas looked in the holo tank. It was displaying an “enhanced” visual view of Regone and the space around it. A formation of thirty blinking amber dots were cruising in toward the planet, decelerating as they came. “How soon before they can be identified?” he asked.
“Any moment now,” Mor said, “though the central one is big; at least a dreadnaught. Probably eight or nine hundred meters from bells to nose.”
Scalas frowned. “Are the Regonese deploying?”
“The ones in orbit are,” Mor replied. “They’re in something close to a panic; they thought they could breathe easy with the Exiles gone. But maybe our Unity friends are keeping closer tabs on their distant operations than we thought.”
Then a comms window blinked, showing a familiar insignia. Scalas relaxed. “Or not,” he said, pointing.
Mor sighed, and touched the control to accept the call and open the channel. “You gave a lot of people a bit of a fright, Commander Rehenek,” he said by way of greeting. “In case you didn’t know, we just got done with a bit of a war in this system.”
Amra Rehenek was a younger man, slight of build, dark haired and pale eyed. The only son of the presumably dead General-Regent of Valdek, he had escaped that doomed world with Scalas and his men, aboard the massive triamic dreadnaught Pride of Valdek. That enormous, starfaring behemoth would be the dreadnaught the Dauntless had detected at the center of the incoming formation.
“I apologize for the alarm,” Rehenek said coolly. “We did not know. They said at the Avar Sector Keep that you and your Legate had come here, so we followed. They did not tell me that you had left for a hot war.”
“It wasn’t when we got here,” Scalas said, standing over Mor’s shoulder. “Things…developed.”
“Ah,” Rehenek said. “I see. Given the state of most of the rest of this arm of the galaxy, I suppose I should not be surprised.”
Scalas watched the indicators change in the holo tank as the Dauntless’s computers processed the data, and raised an eyebrow fractionally. The variety of ships was impressive. There were a few Valdekan ships, including two of the near-ubiquitous egg-shaped Antares III-class ships, that could be found in a sizeable fraction of the space forces for two hundred parsecs around the Waiyungari Shipyards. There were a pair of Vuhk-Ratii sefkhit ships, a flight of Dahuan star cruisers, and five of the heavily armed Fortunian Implacable-class maulers.
“You’ve been busy, I see,” he said.
A faint, proud smile might have crossed Rehenek’s face. “The Unity is moving. We have little time to waste. And I wish to see my homeworld freed before I die.” He squared his shoulders. “I came looking for you because I know that you, at least, Centurion Scalas, understand the threat we face. I wish the Caractacan Brotherhood to join the Alliance of Liberation that I am forming.”
Scalas kept his face carefully neutral. He understood Rehenek in many ways, but that made him somewhat wary of the younger man. Rehenek had a cold, murderous streak in him, and it had come out a time or two, though only in words. He had always kept himself under strict control, even when they had been fighting for their lives to get off the surface of Valdek. But the Brotherhood did not encourage the unalloyed trust of anyone outside the Brotherhood, especially once politics reared its ugly head. And, regardless of the danger they had shared, Rehenek was technically a head of state, even in exile.
“I cannot speak for the Brotherhood as a whole,” he said diplomatically. “We do share a common enemy, however. The Unity has set itself against everything we stand for.”
Rehenek nodded. “This war here on Regone,” he said. “Did it flare up on its own?”
Rehenek was fishing, and Scalas knew it. “No,” he said. “And we will be lifting to go after the agents who were behind it shortly. Would you join us? You have a respectable strike force there; we could use it when we go to Ktatra.”
If the name “Ktatra” held any significa
nce to Rehenek, he didn’t show it. “If there is a chance to hurt the Unity, of course we will come along,” he said. “We need a victory, something to show the nonaligned worlds that there is someone ready to stand up to the Unity, someone who really can. If we can strike at their proxy war network, and so relieve some of the pressure on the nearby systems, that could go a long way toward building the alliance that we need.”
The statement seemed like a rehearsed speech. In the short time he’d known Rehenek, Scalas had heard a few such speeches. The man was a combat leader, and while he could occasionally manage to inject enough real passion into his proclamations to make them sound genuine, most of the time, he sounded like he was reading from a script when he was playing politician.
In a way, that made Scalas like him more. He knew that the weight on the young man’s shoulders had to be immense. He was the sole surviving leader of his people at large, and had taken on the task to try to wage a war against an enemy that had already shown itself to be far more numerous and powerful than any other faction in galactic history.
“Save the speeches for the politicians you need to convince, Amra,” Scalas said. Rehenek suddenly seemed to relax, and a rueful smile flashed across his narrow face, one of the few such expressions Scalas had ever seen him wear. “You and your ships are welcome.
“We have a pirate nest to clean out.”
Even tachyonic, it took time to cross a few thousand light-years. Scalas, his preparations complete, was currently poring over an old volume of The History of the Marakeen Wars. He was strapped into his acceleration couch to stay in place; being tachyonic wasn’t quite the same as weightlessness, but it was an awkward feeling that most tended to deal with by staying seated or prone as much as possible.
There was a knock at his hatch. Putting a finger between the pages, he looked up. “Come,” he said.
Squad Sergeant Seamus Cobb pulled himself inside, fastening the hatch shut behind him. Cobb’s skin was a dark mahogany, in sharp contrast to his pale blond hair and even paler blue eyes. The ancestry that had produced that combination was long lost to history.
He went directly to the small refrigeration unit against the bulkhead, opened it, and pulled out two drinking bulbs of beer, sending one floating across the room to Scalas before strapping himself into the other couch.
“The others are all watching recordings of those Wesalian games that Kahane and Solanus are so obsessed with,” Cobb said by way of explanation.
“And you weren’t interested?” Scalas asked, putting his book away and opening the drinking bulb.
Cobb shrugged. “I’ve seen them before. And I was always more interested in playing sports than watching them.” He took a swig.
“So you decided to come here and drink my beer,” Scalas observed wryly.
Cobb grinned. “And if I’d been promoted ahead of you, you’d be drinking mine,” he pointed out.
“True enough.” They both drank.
“So, how is Bruhnan working out?” Cobb asked quietly.
“Well enough so far,” Scalas replied. He had no worries when it came to discussing such matters with Cobb. “He’s certainly taken steps to counteract any cliquishness in the squad that Volscius might have introduced.”
“I imagine he would,” Cobb said. He and Bruhnan had been squadmates for a while, several years before. “Bruhnan’s got a good head on his shoulders. He’s slow and quiet, but he’s always thinking and observing.” He took another drink. “I think you made an excellent pick; he’s just what Fourth Squad needed. Not to speak ill of the dead, but Volscius was a cancer. Every bit as bad as Dunstan.” He almost spat the disgraced Centurion’s name.
“Volscius was arrogant and obstinate,” Scalas said, a note of warning in his voice, “but he followed orders. He never abandoned his Brothers or got his men killed for personal aggrandizement like Dunstan did. That would be speaking ill of the dead.”
Cobb frowned, staring at the bulkhead. “I suppose you’re right.”
Scalas snorted. “I was his Centurion for two years. Believe me, I know.”
Cobb sighed and nodded, though he was clearly reluctant to give up his antipathy for his deceased fellow squad sergeant. Scalas understood; Volscius had been abrasive and conceited, and Cobb’s temper was shorter than most.
He finally looked up though, as if shrugging off that part of the conversation, a new light in his eyes. “So,” he said. “Ktatra. It’s about time. I’ve dreamed of finding that place for years.”
“We all have,” Scalas said. “If it’s true, it will be quite a coup.”
“You don’t sound quite as eager.”
Scalas looked at him. “After Valdek? Ktatra and the scum who fly out of there seem a little…small, don’t they?”
Cobb’s eyes got far away. He’d lost a lot of his own squad on Valdek, when the Unity’s clones had breached the defenses they’d been holding with the native Valdekan forces. “Yes, I suppose they do, don’t they?” he said.
“But,” Scalas said, realizing that he’d perhaps opened a wound in his brother that had perhaps still been too raw, “Ktatra it is, for now. And we might still be able to hurt the Unity in the process.”
Cobb’s gaze snapped back to the here and now, and he smiled tightly, lifting his beer. “I hear you. To victory.”
“To victory.” The two old comrades drank, as the stars slipped past outside the hull.
Chapter Seven
The holo had not done justice to the real sight of the unnamed system where Ktatra lurked.
The sky was filled with billowing, glowing clouds of gas and dust. Stars blazed in the murk, surrounded by weird distortions as they shone through curtains of nebulosity. The starships were trailing faintly luminous wakes behind them as they plowed through the relatively thick interstellar medium.
While the Bergenholm field removed an object’s inertia, it did not make that object intangible. Therefore, while there wasn’t quite the kinetic impact of a speck of interstellar dust or gas striking an inert object at the kind of velocities that the Bergenholm made possible, friction was still a decided problem, particularly in denser parts of the interstellar void, like nebulae. A ship traveling at parsecs an hour could brush away anything it struck, but often at the price of enough friction to melt its hull.
So, starships had to have a way of shunting the gas and particulate matter in the interstellar medium out of the way. This most often took the shape of an ionizing laser projected from the ship’s nose, and a powerful electromagnetic field that pushed the resulting ions away from the hull. It was something of the reverse of the old slower-than-light Bussard ramjets that many races had used on their first steps to the stars.
Inside the nebula, at the velocities necessary to cross interstellar distances, tachyonic starships had to ionize and shunt enough material that they left trailing, electric blue tracks of luminescence behind them. The excited ions faded quickly, but at the superluminal velocities involved, that still meant tracks most of a light-year long.
Those pale streaks of light were converging on a dirty ring of debris, yellow, black, and brown, lit from within by a brilliant point of light that was the young star. The infant sun’s light was weirdly diffused by the protoplanetary disc surrounding it, but was still bright enough that it would have blinded anyone looking directly at it, even from outside the disc.
Twenty light-minutes outside the tenuous outer edge of the disc, and slightly above the ecliptic, all thirty-four ships went inert, suddenly reverting to their original velocities. They immediately began to maneuver and fire their engines, adjusting their vectors to match the proto-system’s intrinsic velocity.
“You know,” Cobb muttered from his acceleration couch on the Dauntless’s troop deck, “when we found out where Ktatra was, I could have kicked myself. ‘Why didn’t we think to look there?’ I asked myself.” He snorted. “Now I know. Just entering the nebula means taking your life in your hands.”
The infantry Brothers had been watc
hing the approach from the displays in their squad rooms. They were still too far out, and the situation too unknown, to be waiting in the dropships. There was a great deal of scouting and reconnaissance to be done before the infantry Centuries could be deployed.
“That’s what the ion shunt is for,” Kunn pointed out flatly. Coming from anyone else, that would have been a wry comment. Coming from Kunn, it was a serious explanation for something he didn’t realize his brother squad sergeant already understood.
Kunn had some odd blind spots.
“Yes, I know,” Cobb said. He could have been acerbic, but they’d all gotten a little used to Kunn’s strangeness. “But there’s enough crud out there that the slightest problem with the ion shunt, and your ship’s burning up. And that’s before we even get to deliberately flying into a protoplanetary disc.”
“All sorts of marauders have been doing this for almost a century, objective,” Scalas pointed out. “It can’t be too suicidal.”
“I’d hesitate to say that before we see how many wrecks might be drifting out here,” Kahane replied.
“There wouldn’t be much of a wreck left, would there?” Solanus asked. “Particularly if an ion shunt failed?”
“Depends,” Cobb said. “If they managed to shut down the Bergenholm in time, they might just have cooked to death in the hull.”
Scalas just shook his head. He could do that without straining; Mor was adjusting velocity at a mere one G. There was no need for higher acceleration at that point.
“Enough deep space horror stories, Cobb,” he said. “You’ll make Kunn’s brain pop. He can’t tell that you’re kidding.”
