Independence: Book 1 of The Legacy Ship Trilogy

by Nick Webb

  “IDF intel has been trying to put the pieces together on this terrorist … incident.”

  Fifty thousand people incinerated, and he calls it an incident.

  He continued. “I can’t go into all the details because your security clearance has lapsed, but … there’s been social unrest recently on San Martin. Stuff that hasn’t made it onto the news. GPC related.”

  “Yeah, I knew that. Everyone knows that.”

  He shrugged. “But what you might not know is that IDF intel has been tracking Danny for about a year now—”

  “Tracking Danny? Why?”

  “—and three weeks ago, he disappeared. Gone. And … we have reason to suspect he might be involved in the Sangre incident.”

  She turned, and shut the door again. “Impossible. Danny’s a good kid. He’d never, ever, get involved in anything like this. Period.”

  Oppenheimer shrugged. “I’m only passing along what I’ve heard. Just consider it: the Chesapeake is destroyed by an unknown enemy, Captain Diaz is dead, and just twenty lightyears away in the same sector, a colony gets hit by a nuclear terrorist attack, and in the same system you have widespread social and political unrest. The events are not obviously related, but … well, I’ll let you connect your own dots. It’s your family, after all.”

  Yes. Danny was family. And so was Diaz. Before he’d been captain, he was her XO. Dammit, Oppenheimer knew exactly how to ensnare her.

  “Fine. Just this once. Just this mission. After it’s done and we’ve sorted it out, I’m gone for good.”

  Oppenheimer flashed a half-smile. “I knew you’d come around. Good.” He pulled a small datapad out of his pocket and tapped on it. Moments later, the door opened and the officers who’d accompanied him reappeared. “We’ve got you a ship, and the crew is mostly in place—I’ll give you the luxury of choosing your own senior staff. Your pick of anyone in IDF, of course.”

  “What old clunker of a ship did you requisition away from some hapless captain somewhere?”

  Oppenheimer’s half-smile bloomed into a full grin. “Old? Hardly. This time, Shelby, I think even you’ll be impressed. If you’ll follow Commander Yarbrough here, he’ll familiarize you with the Independence.”

  The ship name stirred a vague memory of some classified conversations long ago. “Why does that sound familiar?”

  “Because IDF engineering conceived the project under your tenure. It was, and is, highly classified.”

  “Why?”

  Oppenheimer walked out the door, calling behind as he left. “You’re about to find out.”

  Chapter Three

  Oxford Novum University, Whitehaven, Britannia

  Curie Building, Lecture hall 201

  “If you’ll follow me, ma’am,” said Commander Yarbrough, holding an arm out towards the door. Proctor eyed him with unease before picking her briefcase back up and retreating out of the classroom. Yarbrough followed close behind—he was young, and already struck her as hopelessly overeager. “I think you’ll be very pleased with what we’ve been doing in ship design the past few years, ma’am,” he said with a bounce in his step that she found almost nauseating.

  “I’m sure.”

  She followed him to the shuttle parked on the landing pad and slid into the copilot seat next to him. “We headed to Scotland Yard?” she asked, referring tongue-in-cheek to the dry-dock shipyards on the outskirts of town. The citizens of Whitehaven—Britannia’s capital city—were known for their quirky sense of humor.

  “No, ma’am. This ship has far too high a classification for that. We couldn’t have everyone in Whitehaven look out the window and see our Little Bird hovering in the distance.”

  “Little bird?”

  “That’s our nickname for the ISS Independence. The lead designer thought it fitting. You’ll meet her soon—she’ll be the chief engineer on the mission.”

  “I thought I got to choose my senior staff?” said Proctor. “Are we already pulling the bait-and-switch? Shit….”

  Commander Yarbrough shook his head as he maneuvered the shuttle out to IDF’s Whitehaven base near Scotland Yard shipyards on the outskirts of the city. “No, ma’am. You’re of course free to replace her at your whim, though I would think with her expertise in the design of the ship you might want to keep her on. The new tech we’ve built into her is … well, impressive is not a terribly impressive word, but it’s all I’ve got.”

  They landed, debarked, and climbed aboard an orbital transfer shuttle that would take them up through the atmosphere and out to Wellington Shipyards in orbit around the gas giant Calais, past the asteroid belt, just one q-jump away. As she passed through the hatch, she nearly jumped when a booming voice greeted her.

  “Shelby! Damn good to see you.”

  Sitting in the pilot’s seat was a middle-aged man who seemed like he was stuffed into the uniform of a recently graduated cadet. In spite of the tight-fitting flight suit, his face sported a fashionable, well-groomed goatee, and of course a broad, friendly smile.

  She smiled back. “Good to see you too, Ballsy,” she said, using his old callsign from when they’d served together on the Constitution and the Warrior. Captain Tyler “Ballsy” Volz—though what he was doing here and not on his own ship escaped her for a split second before she remembered his ship had been decommissioned the year before. “Did Oppenheimer suck you into this too?”

  “Suck? Hell, I asked for it. Rumor was going around last night that he was calling you back into service, and I wasn’t going to let some snot-nosed kid be your CAG.”

  Proctor gaped at him. He was pushing sixty himself, and should have had a cushy desk job as a rear admiral somewhere with a beach. “You’re volunteering to be my Commander of the Air Group?”

  “Do European politicians smell like cheap prostitutes?” He turned in his seat to smirk at Commander Yarbrough, whose face had wrinkled up at the improper reference. “That’s a yes, son. They do.”

  “But you’ve got the rank of captain, Ballsy—”

  “Which made it a whole lot easier to pull the strings necessary to get here. Hold on,” he added as he pushed the accelerator to maximum. The buildings flew past in a blur.

  “Captain Volz, please keep the flight parameters within normal range,” said Commander Yarbrough, gripping his armrests.

  “Kindly unclench your sphincter, Commander. I’ve been flying one of these things since before you were born.” He angled the nose skyward and the shuttle leapt through the clouds.

  Proctor smiled—Tyler Volz was one of the senior staff she would have chosen anyway, if she’d known he’d say yes. As deeply uneasy as she felt about this mission, having him along took the edge off her apprehension.

  “So tell me, Commander Yarbrough, what kind of new tech does this baby have?” she said.

  Yarbrough nervously tightened his seat restraint as the craft blazed up towards the atmosphere. “Oh, various new offensive and defensive capabilities, as well as a new experimental propulsion system. We call it trans-quantum-jump technology. Basically lets us do an unusually long standard q-jump. About fifty times as far.”

  Proctor puffed out a surprised breath. “Five lightyears per jump? Holy shit….”

  Yarbrough nodded solemnly. “Indeed. I’ve been doing preliminary tests with the skeleton crew we have aboard—our navigator calls them tranny-jumps, though I’ve asked her repeatedly to stop,” he added with a pained expression. Apparently the schoolyard humor was wasted on him, though Proctor smiled on the inside at the term. Tranny-jump. Best not to say that one in front of Oppenheimer.

  “Tranny-jumps?” Ballsy smirked. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

  Yarbrough fiddled with the co-pilot controls in an attempt to compensate for Captain Volz’s gut-churning maneuvers through the atmosphere—the old fighter pilot simply couldn’t help himself as he spiraled them up to space. “I’ve devoted quite a bit of thought to this, actually. At first I thought we could stick with q-jumps, for continuity’s sake, but th
en I leaned towards t-jumps for disambiguation. But once I realized that t-jumps could be confused with transmission dumps from the comm station—t-dumps—I came up with q-t-jumps—”

  “Cutie jumps?” Volz made a face.

  Yarbrough shrugged. “But then I decided a more formal approach might be needed so I came up with a list of possibilities that might—”

  Proctor rolled her eyes—this Commander certainly dotted his ‘I’s. “We’ll just stick with t-jumps, Commander.” She watched out the viewport in front of them as the atmosphere blazed past. Yarbrough had engaged the inertial cancelers. She was pleasantly surprised—inertial canceler technology must have also improved since she resigned from IDF, as the turbulence during their ascent was hardly noticeable. “How big is this beauty, anyway?”

  Ballsy smirked again. “That’s what she said.”

  “You never grew up, did you?” Proctor feigned a frown, but truth be told, she missed the banter, the crude jokes, and the joy of serving with fellow irreverent officers, in spite of having her strings constantly pulled—yanked, usually—by top brass and politicians. Academia never filled that void for her. How could it?

  “Now why the hell would I want to do that?”

  Commander Yarbrough pulled out a small datapad, unfolded it, and started reading. “Five hundred and one meters long, powered by a fifty terawatt direct-injection dual fusion-antimatter plant. Central computer is infinitely-cored and non-localized, distributed throughout the walls and decks of the ship, standard propulsion is rated at over ten g’s with quad-stabilized and phase-shifted graviton-emitting inertial cancelers. The tranny drive’s cap banks recharge in under a minute, enabling a maximum long-range cruising rate of over three hundred light years an hour. And over fifty—”

  Proctor held up a hand. “Three hundred lightyears per hour? That gets us to the edge of known space in less than two hours!”

  “Yes, ma’am. Like I said, it’s highly classified. IDF has been sitting on this tech for three years now, and is eager that it not become common knowledge quite yet.”

  Proctor did the math, and figured they could get the Independence to the Irigoyen sector in less than ten minutes. Hell, this thing is on as soon as I gather my crew.

  As if on cue, Volz announced, “Hold on tight, boys and girls. We’re about to make the q-jump to Calais.” A few seconds later he pressed the initiator button, and the view out the windows suddenly changed from the blue-tinged atmosphere of Britannia to the red-and-orange-dappled clouds of Calais, one of the Britannia system’s two gas giants. A few dozen kilometers away floated Wellington Shipyards, where dozens of ships in various stages of assembly or maintenance were connected to giant, sweeping construction nacelles. It had been mostly destroyed during the Second Swarm War, but in a fit of post-war construction, IDF had rebuilt her even larger than the first, keeping with humanity’s defiantly stubborn tradition of you knock down my toy, I build an even bigger toy.

  Tucked underneath one of the nacelles, like a little bird nestled under its mother’s wing, was a ship unlike any Proctor had seen. While the old Legacy Fleet ships she’d served on during the last half of her military career were old, bulky, and built for punishing combat, this one seemed like a work of art.

  “There she is, Admiral,” said Yarbrough. “Ready to leave space dock at your command.”

  Volz whistled. “She’s a beauty all right. Nothing like the clunkers we’re use to. Then again, those old clunkers saved our lives more times than I can count. You sure this thing is up to it? Any tricks up her sleeve?”

  And after over an hour of constant frowns, furrowed brows, and worried consternation, Yarbrough finally smiled. “You’ll see.”

  Chapter Four

  Irigoyen Sector, Bolivar System, Bolivar

  Watchdog Station, High orbit

  Lieutenant Ethan Zivic knew, beyond a doubt, that his posting aboard the defensive platform Watchdog over the far-flung colony world of Bolivar was a punishment. Retaliation for insubordination. Well, “insubordination” in the eyes of his former dickweed of a commander. In essence all he’d done was tell the truth.

  That uniform does make you look fat, ma’am. That was all he’d said. Was there anything wrong with that? She’d asked him for his unvarnished, truthful opinion, and he’d given it.

  Sure, it could have been the time he’d shown up drunk for duty, but it seemed like half the officers on the Farragut did that anyway. The XO was a fat bastard fluff-coke-addict herself, so she tended to look the other way with the sorts of violations that would make her a hypocrite if she called her crew on them. But insulting her appearance? Even when she looked like a massive over-grown stoned toad?

  Heresy.

  He pressed a few buttons, on mental autopilot, running through the regular hourly sensor scans that would ostensibly warn him of any unexpected ships in the vicinity Bolivar. Due to the recent emergency on Sangre de Cristo, and the even more recent disappearance of the Chesapeake about ten lightyears away, he even paid some attention to the scans. Usually he played solitaire or jack’s doozies while the scans came in, confirming the negative reading by the soft beep that always accompanied the lack of any intruders.

  Intruders? Heh. It had been years, decades, since there’d been any intruders. The Swarm was dead. The Russian Confederation had withdrawn into a state of inward-looking hermitage, the Caliphate had elected a Mullah that, for once, was preaching not only peaceful co-existence, but cooperation with United Earth, and the Chinese Intersolar Democratic Republic, as usual, only wanted to profit from the West. But profit peacefully. War was bad for business. Unless that business was armaments and ships, in which case the CIDR profited almost as handsomely as when there was peace.

  He looked out the window.

  And fell out of his chair.

  He never usually fell out of his chair—at least not while sober. But even so he found himself on the floor—he’d tried to leap to his feet so fast that his knees had collided with the cramped console in front of him and sent him sprawling down again, painfully.

  “Emergency action,” he called upward towards the auto-comm. “Defensive ops on full alert! Intruder approaching!”

  Why hadn’t he heard anything? If the scan came back clean, there would have been the usual beep. If the scan came back with a contact, there would have been a raucous klaxon, just like in drills. He’d have to have a stern talking-to with the boys down in maintenance.

  To his eyes, the ship was nothing much to look at. Bulky, but with no discernible surface features indicating weaponry. Covered with small pod-like protrusions. But an intruder was an intruder. He’d received no notice from IDF to expect any unknowns ships or foreign vessels, so that made this a red-alert event.

  Except all he wanted to do was drink. A lot. He reached down to his knee, fumbling with the top of his boot, loosening the strap and reaching inside for the small flask just below his knee. He usually never started drinking until just before getting off duty, but today was special. Why it was special, he couldn’t fathom. It just felt special, dammit. And everyone knows you drink on special days.

  The little ship erupted with a red beam which pierced the defensive platform. Well that’s a problem, he thought, and seriously considered getting on the comm to alert the mag-rail crews. Instead, he tipped the flask back and downed the whole thing. Damn, I need more of this shit.

  The door to his little command center burst open, and Commander Dipshit strode through. At least, that was what Zivic called him in his mind. His mustache bounced up and down when he talked, and his comb-over tended to stick upright when he was agitated, and now was one of those comb-over erection moments. He supposed the ship firing at them was the cause, but was it really something to let one’s comb-over stick up like that? Honestly, he looked like he should be driving an old-style darkened-window hovervan past a school, slowly, waving candy out the window.

  “What the hell is going on, Zivic? Why weren’t we warned?”

  Blow it out
your hole.

  He stifled the rude response, allowing a slightly less rude retort to come out in its place. “Seriously, sir, do I have to do everything around here?”

  Part of him couldn’t believe his ears. Was he really saying that? What the hell was he doing? The other part of him laughed like a twelve-year-old boy, and wanted to add a boob joke just for good measure. Honestly, the commander’s man-boobs jiggled with every step. It was hysterically funny, especially when combined with the comb-over erection and the flop sweat.

  The commander stopped in his tracks. He looked conflicted, alternating between a face that wanted to clock his subordinate, and a face that was absolutely, utterly bewildered.

  Thankfully, the bewilderment won out. “Something’s off, Zivic. Can you feel it?”

  “Feel it? Are you asking me to fondle your balls again? Because that look on your face tells me—”

  “Shut the hell up, Lieutenant. And listen.”

  Zivic forced himself to bottle up the next adolescent comment, and calm his breathing to the point that he could hear.

  Shouting. Screaming. Laughing. Somewhere down the hall someone was having an amazing party. Or a bloody-fisted death match. Whatever it was, it was loud.

  The commander swore. “Can’t you feel that?” The man’s hands shook, and his eyes grew wide. He flexed his fingers into white-knuckled fists. Under his breath, barely audible to Zivic, he muttered a foreign-sounding word, and crossed himself. “Golgothica.”

  Huh? And what the hell was the guy doing crossing himself? Had he always been religious? The laughs and screams down the hall sounded out even louder. “And why they’re partying while we’re being fired at is beyond me, Pat. Patsy. Can I call you Patsy?”

  A fist sucker-punched Zivic across the face, and his mouth filled with blood. Shit, am I going to take this? Time to muster up, Ethan. As soon as I find that next drink….