2166 - FORCE LIBERTY

by A. D. Bloom

  "But what are the Shediri?" Dana said.

  "All we know is what the Shediri sent us and they left out all of their physical details. The entity in the seat of governmental power, the one that contacted us, has a name and translated through the conceptual language matrix, that name means Hive Regent Kesik. It's a hive mind organism possibly. Or a collective of sorts. We don't know."

  "So they're bugs," she said.

  "We expect they may have commonalities with something analogous to a terrestrial arthropod or insect in the same way we have commonalities with our ancestor primates and mammals."

  Ram said, "What about their technology? Can they actually help us fight the Ortani Imperium?"

  "We don't know. Their technology is almost certainly more advanced simply because they've been in contact with so many more species than we have. This is a closeup view of the ship that intercepted the diplomatic probe and delivered the message."

  Gilead dismissed the projected image of Shedir 4 with a backhanded gesture and flicked up an image of an alien craft that puzzled everyone there. "It's small - less than 30 meters...half the size of a torpedo junk." It had two sets of stub-wings with something cylindrical and at least partially hollow slung underneath. Ram could make out what looked like conduits running to them from the main hull of the vessel. "It's got quite a minimal IR signature. Thermal variation on the hull suggests thin armor, but it's just a guess."

  Devlin glanced at Tig Meester. The redsuit seemed interested in what could be some kind of new field coil. "Between the stub-wings," Ram said. "Meester, what do those look like to you?"

  "I have no idea, Mr. Devlin. Some kind of locomotive field generator maybe? Looks like a field coil like from an inertial negation or artificial gravity pinch, but you'd need a lot of power for that application. More than we know how to generate aboard a ship."

  "Their message stated nothing implicit or explicit about actually giving us technologies," said Dana, "Is that correct?"

  Gilead nodded. "They wouldn't have sent us a message if they didn't want to rebel against their Imperium overlords. It's that simple really. Just communicating with us is risking punishment. They could have ignored us, but instead they invited us to visit. Now, our task is to follow their protocols to the letter and show them we're not dangerous and not invaders so we can lay the foundation for an alliance." The UN envoy didn't look at Anton Cyning and Ram directly then. Gilead looked into everyone else's eyes, but Ram knew it was he and Cyning the UN envoy spoke to. "Only I will be negotiating with the Shediri. I won't mince words. Given Staas Company's tragic mismanagement of Humanity's first contact with the Squidies, we are lucky to be receiving any alien invitations at all."

  "Staas Company wishes you the best of luck," said Cyning. Ram thought the company man looked somehow predatory at that moment, but nobody else seemed alarmed.

  SCS Taipan

  Taipan's bridge was gilded in gold and paneled with extinct hardwoods, but at the moment, the projectors on the vessel's bridge had been configured to display a 360 degree view of the surrounding space of the Beta Draconis system. If one dismissed the consoles and the lines of the bulkheads, it appeared to the eye as they all stood on the topdeck, out on the ship's hull, looking upon the 950-meter carrier Hardway and the fragile, 375-meter, wheel-shaped breaching ship alongside. Captain Chun's battleship held station next to them like a moon in orbit.

  At Ram's three o'clock high the system's lurid, red gas giant eyeballed them while the Squidies' broken moon crossed its face like a misshapen pea, graveyard to 70 billion. It was hard to look at the Squidies ruined homeworld moon. But it was harder to look at Dana. Her gaze was sharp and poisonous and pointed directly at him. The woman Ram loved spoke through grit teeth. "As Captains that sailed the seas of Earth had the pleasure of uniting couples, so do I now have that ancient pleasure."

  Ram didn't dare glance at his bride. The twenty-five year old clone was smiling behind that veil. She was younger and more attractive than her last incarnation. Probably more dangerous, too. She had an extra lifetime's worth of memories in that head and 25 years of her own including specialized training in all the combat arts her predecessor had lacked. Where she'd gotten the veil and the wedding dress, he'd never know. She called herself Margo now.

  Dana's glare shot hot needles and acid at him as she spoke. "Do you, Commodore Ram Devlin, take Margo Wheeling as your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to ho-"

  "I do." He said it before she was done just to speed it up, to make it less painful, but Dana curled her lip and sneered at him.

  "And you," Dana said. "Margo Wheeling. Do you take Commodore Ram Devlin as your husband?"

  "Oh, yes." His bride said it with a smile so shining and genuine that he almost believed in it.

  "By the power vested in me by the United Earth Charter and Staas Company, I now unite you in marriage." She didn't say to kiss the bride and Ram didn't move to, but Margo flipped the veil up and over her head and glided her body towards Ram's so quickly that he couldn't do anything but wrap his arms limply around her and meet her kiss with his lips held pressed together. The prying slip of her tongue into his mouth made his eyes shoot open in surprise. It was with that bug-eyed expression that he met Dana Sellis' poison stare before she headed for the ship's command chair.

  "That was lovely, darling," Margo said. She winked at him and then glided to the VIPs to accept their congratulations and kisses and hopefully not slip them any tongue.

  Asa Biko congratulated him. Biko wouldn't have done that if he'd known whom Margo really was. Her last incarnation almost killed them all more than once.

  Wilhelm Gilead, the United Nations Special Envoy had looked bored through the ceremony. His thin face had hung slack, but now, his darting eyes were once again full of the suspicion he'd displayed ever since he'd come aboard a Staas Company ship. Ram didn't blame him one bit.

  Anton Cyning, smiled beatifically as if now, with this ceremony, everything was finally right in the universe. According to the Board of Directors, winning the war wasn't enough. A man like Commodore Ran Devlin had an image to maintain on behalf of Staas Company and their Privateer Fleet and once the internal gossip got round that he'd taken an ex-lover and a lost son aboard the personal ship that would sail with his command, Staas Company required that he marry the woman immediately. He told them their policy was regressive Squidy-spunk. They agreed with him and pointed out how that fact changed nothing. It was marriage to Margo or let someone else lead Hardway to the Shediri homeworld.

  "Mr. Reitz," Dana said to her executive officer as she took the command chair, "Turn off these projectors and return my bridge to its previous condition before we all get space-sick."

  Reitz nodded to Billings, now at their Ops console. Within seconds, the bridge's projectors went dark and revealed the gilded bulkheads and exquisite paneling that ran through the entire ship but managed to crescendo on the command deck and the bridge.

  SCS Taipan was a work of art that had been turned into a flying fortress, a belt-iron steel armored castle. She'd been built as a yacht before the previous owner had her converted to a command ship and layered in so much armor that the grace of her 176-meter Staas teardrop hull was well-nigh buried.

  Her small-bore railguns weren't about to hull any alien battleships, but with Hardway and a new UN battleship along for protection, Taipan would make a perfect diplomatic ship. The UN had agreed to use her as one for the mission as a consolation prize to Staas Company for leaving them out of the meeting and any actual treaty negotiations.

  Ram said, "I've got pressing matters to attend to aboard Hardway, so if you'll excuse me..."

  "But darling!"said his new wife.

  He ignored Margo and made a direct path for the aft bridge hatch. He was thankful that Dana didn't turn her head or rotate her eyeballs one degree in their sockets to look at him. It's my personal ship, he thought. And I'm the one scrambling to get off her bridge.

  Dana caught up with him two decks down, running t
hrough the carpeted and hardwood paneled passages to intercept him before he made it to the ship's tiny launch bay. "Commodore!" she shouted. He was glad the corridor was empty.

  "You don't have to call me that," he said. "We're Privateers; you don't even have to call me sir."

  "I need the full tactical briefing. The one you get with your new rank. There's something I'm not being told, Ram. I can tell by the way the UN envoy looks nervous and the company man looks so smug."

  "Cyning always looks like that."

  She said, "He knows something we don't."

  "So what else is new?" The glower on her face said that wasn't the answer she'd wanted. "When I know something, you'll know." He turned to face her square, stepped closer then and lowered his voice. "Don't be angry about this marriage. You're well-aware it's utterly meaningless. It won't change anything between you and I...between us..."

  "I don't think this is really the most professional time to discuss it, Commodore."

  "It's for appearances," he said. "It's not a real marriage."

  "Are you saying that's not your real wife up on my bridge? Is that not your real son in their quarters?"

  Dana could never know who they really were. "I haven't seen her in almost nine years," he said. "She had nowhere else to go. She and the boy have so many enemies on Earth, they can't go back."

  She exhaled hard out her nostrils. "I'm going back up to my bridge." Dana turned and walked. Over her shoulder she shouted, "Just make sure they're off this ship before we get to Shedir."

  "I told them already. They know. Biko found a cabin for them in Hardway's sub-tower."

  Dana didn't look back at him as she got on the lift.

  3

  Kodiak Squadron

  Draconis-Hellas FTL Transit

  T-minus thirty seconds to spatial breach...

  In flight school, Crunch put corn nuts in his helmet. It was the sound him of eating them on comms that got him his name. Being a better exo-atmospheric fighter pilot than anyone thought he would be got him in the seat of an F-223. He wasn't sure if it was good luck that got him assigned to Hardway. Every fighter pilot on the carrier was a nugget because all the veterans were dead.

  Today, Crunch found himself flying a close combat patrol over a spatial breaching ship that looked like she was about to detonate at any second and take his flight of Sky Jacks with it.

  The breaching ship Stetson was, in fact, operating as designed. Lightning crackled up and down her ring-shaped hull. It danced down the struts to the axle where her five reactors were stacked. That 375-meter doughnut was packed with capacitors and when they overcharged them like they'd done now, Stetson leaked zap so badly that full-fledged electrical storms erupted around her.

  The task force had already steamed to the Draconis-Hellas transit, the point in the Beta Draconis system where the hypermass distortions of the two adjoining stars came close to intersecting, essentially weakening the fabric of space enough to rip it and create an FTL tunnel between stars.

  The task force's UN battleship loomed over the carrier. Hardway didn't have Guerrero's titanic bow plate or her massive guns or her armor, but she had an air group. If it came to a fight, Crunch would rather bet on the Privateers and their carriers than the UN's battleships.

  The Commodore's personal vessel, castle Taipan, had tucked in between the warships. That little fortress of a ship had plenty of armor, but she'd be wise to stay out of a fight.

  "Kodiak, 2-1, your flight is all over my sky. Tighten the hell up," Kodiak 1-1 said in his ear. Homerun, his squadron leader, got the hero name because he never struck out at bat. He never struck out at bat because the women couldn't resist the combination of his face, his pilot's wings, and the confidence he exuded. That confidence was contagious, but Crunch always wondered if Homerun got the confidence like he got the name, mostly just because of his face. "You copy me, Crunch? Tighten up."

  "Kodiak, 1-1, this is Flight Two, we acknowledge and...uhh...will comply."

  A voice from the bridge of the breaching ship came over all channels then. "All vessels, all craft, this SCS Stetson. Discharge is imminent. We are breaching space. Hold on to your hats."

  Stetson fired five particle emitters mounted on her ring. So close to them, Crunch thought he could actually see the beams themselves like you glimpse sun on a spider's web, but it shimmered more and somehow looked diffused even though each stream was only the thickness of a single atomic nuclei. The emitters hyper-accelerated the streams to such a high percentage of the speed of light, they gave off an uncanny radiation the operators on those ships said you could see with the naked eye if you were close enough.

  Where the streams of particles collided, all hell erupted. It started like a little fission det like from a warhead just 5Ks out, but warheads flash and fade. This ball of hellfire didn't diminish. As the particle streams from Stetson continued to collide, what looked like a little star grew. The visor of his flight helmet dimmed to protect his eyes, but he still winced from the way the stabbing rays stung him. The multispectral display in his flight helmet showed him the cascading bursts and jets of exotic particles in apparent parthenogenesis at the poles of the swelling inferno.

  When that ball of hell had grown to over two kilometers wide, it stayed the same size for some seconds then, like the energy being continually thrown by Stetson was now going down some endless well. Then, leaving a thin, cowl of a membrane behind, it collapsed. That was the only way Crunch could say it. It collapsed in on itself somehow and all that terrible hellfire got sucked into the center.

  What remained was a flame-fringed tunnel with fiery, undulating walls. If he used his flight helmet to zoom in and look down the throat of the burning maw that had opened, he could see the far-off stars of a system seventeen light years away.

  The Sky Jacks of Kodiak Squadron led the task force in. Kodiak Flight One got the glory flying point, and Crunch's flight got to follow them. Unknown particles skating the dimensional threshold of the transit splashed over his canopy like a wave of firefly sparks as he and his wingman entered.

  Inside, the exhaust flares of Flight One burned close ahead. "Twelve minutes to the next system, Kodiaks." 1-1 came through clean on comms, only slightly garbled in the weirdness here. "Try to keep up with me, Crunch, or the carrier might smack you in the ass."

  Beta Ceti

  Crunch stared into the swirls and whorls of the orange giant passing to port. With his flight helmet zoomed in, filtering the light and showing him UV, X-ray, and infrared as well, the surface of it looked to be one big storm, a ball of fury in space. The fronts of plasma he saw whipping over the surface were planet-sized and moving faster than he was.

  A major magnetic line in the region must have snapped, because the burning plasma and stellar atmo went dark and cool and receded like a tide going out in all directions. The fiery sea withdrew from that spot he'd been watching and when it did, it revealed something that shouldn't have been there. It was just a speck, but it was made of perfectly straight lines.

  He zoomed in to see stabbing towers, kilometers high, spires foreign and unnatural and apparently protected by some kind of energy bubble. The great waves of plasma broke over its ovoid shape in cascading crashes. The atmo withdrew a little more and the hull appeared at the center along with the rest of the seven towers. It was undoubtedly a ship of some kind. He knew that with certainty not because of its shape, but because before the burning plasma sea whipped over it and hid it again, it gave him a shiver like it was staring back.

  Kodiak 1-1 didn't believe Crunch at first because the plasma of the stellar atmo had washed over the alien ship to hide it again. Homerun looked at the footage Crunch transmitted over secure IR and said it was a glitch, an artifact from degradation of his array's transducers, but when 1-1 finally gave in and forwarded the sighting to the Air Group Commander on Hardway, nobody there seemed to share his squadron leader's doubts about whether or not he saw something. They immediately sent out three of Hardway's torpedo junks conf
igured with the full spread of prospecting gear.

  Crunch talked shit like all the other fighter pilots about the slow and lumbering Staas Company mining junks that had being converted for combat, but nobody ever disparaged their sensor package. They were made to find metallic ore for profit. Those arrays could spot a paperclip at a hundred-million Ks. It made Crunch feel slightly vindicated to see that Hardway took him seriously enough to send a flight of three out to take a closer look. He didn't even mind when his flight got pulled off the patrol and tasked to fly escort.

  "Know what this means?" his wingman Wicker said, "Means we're going to miss out on the burger-filled buns Cookie is servin' for lunch."

  While Hardway and the task force continued on, the junks sent by the AGC flew three abreast. Bighorn, Fillie's Flank, and Pandy steamed just 2Ks apart.

  At 50 million Ks over the stormy surface of Beta Ceti, Wicker asked why the junks hadn't found anything yet if the array's on them were so good. "Maybe we change your name to Goose Chase," his wingman said.

  "They're still mapping the mag fields...and not just what it looks like, but what's...normal. Gotta' know what's normal to look for an anomaly," he said, watching the three junks bake their bellies in a line as they plunged closer still, focusing on the point about 17 degrees from the pole where he'd spotted the bogie.

  The fighters broke away and flew a holding pattern at 45 million Ks while the 50-meter junks with their armor and bigger reactors pressed their luck against the gravity and mag fields on their own. Five minutes later, one of the electronic warfare officers on Fillie's Flank called out, "Eureka! Eureka! 17.39385 degrees from the south magnetic pole, AnMats at bearing 19 mark 110. Contact with anomalous materials."

  "Verified. Pandy can verify AnMats. There's something big hiding down in all that plasma."