by Kal Spriggs
With Tanis, she figured they would probably sell the data to any interested parties. That could wind up biting them later, particularly if they sold the information to the Shadow Lords or another enemy.
Admiral Collae, as always, was the wild card. He was both ally and enemy, a man who made decisions based upon his own internal calculations and who didn't seem to care about repercussions for little things like betrayal. He'd become famous fighting the Balor, but he'd also fought plenty against Colonial Republic military governors, one day leading a rebellion against a warlord and the next helping a dictator to crush his political dissidents. He did whatever he thought would benefit his goals... though what exactly those were Alannis didn't know. “I think the less we operate with Admiral Collae, the better,” she said.
Captain Beeson nodded, “Agreed. I had planned to operate mostly in conjunction with our existing allies. Now, if that is all, Lieutenant Giovanni?”
“Yes, sir,” Alannis recognized that her feedback as a person of state had ended. Now she was back to one more junior officer. She rose and left his office, but she couldn't quite stop her mind from considering the topic of her ex-husband. She'd been shocked enough by his attack on Imperial House on Faraday. He knew Lucius, he knew her. This was exactly the kind of thing that would provoke an immediate military response. Not only that, but he'd managed to anger just about every nation in human space.
Reese should have been smarter than all this, she felt. He'd provoked not just the pirates and criminal organizations, he'd drawn the fire of everyone. She couldn't help but wonder if somehow it was deliberate, if he somehow wanted all that attention. She couldn't see the point behind it, though.
A quiet voice warned her that she needed to figure it out, though, because Reese wasn't stupid. He had to know what he'd drawn down on himself. He's got a plan in all of this, somewhere, she thought, I just need to figure it out before it is too late.
***
Chapter V
767A36 System
Unclaimed Space
November 20, 2409
The Bowie emerged from shadow space over five hundred thousand kilometers away from the 767A36 system ansible platform. “What have we got?” Forrest asked as his sensors officer looked up.
“No ships visible,” Lieutenant Thomas said. The redheaded officer wore a frown, “but there's a lot of debris in the system. It's not quite as much of a mess as Faraday's outer system, but there's still plenty to hide behind.”
Forrest pursed his lips as he considered the situation. The 767A36 system was technically in neutral space, but it lay between the Centauri Confederation and the Tanis System, not far from the least-time course to the Formalhaut system. Formalhaut’s three colonies often allied with Tau Ceti against Alpha Centauri. Since 767A36 also lay only one jump away from the Kapteyn's Star system, where the Illuari Temple of Light lay under quarantine, it saw some Confederation military traffic and patrols.
The Centauri Confederation didn't officially claim the system, but that was mostly because there wasn't anything in the system to colonize. Most of 767A36, other than one gas giant, was rubble, the rocky detritus of planets formed and then torn apart by the twin stars, Delta Primus and Beta Sextus. The lone surviving gas giant didn't quite contain enough mass to qualify as a red dwarf.
That gas giant, Epsilon Quintus, was where the ansible platform orbited. The debris rings around it were considerable... which was why Forrest hesitated to order his ship to draw any nearer.
“Can we link with the platform from here?” Forrest asked.
“We can,” Lieutenant Thomas said, “but with what this Leone guy did before, he may be able to destroy the platform remotely.”
“Yeah,” Forrest nodded, “that's what I'm afraid of as well.” He glanced at his display and then shrugged, “Lieutenant Medica, any thoughts?”
“If you get me to the platform, I'm pretty sure I can bypass any programming he's put into the platform and then I can extract a copy of its records,” Lieutenant Medica said. “Other than that, I'm not a match for this guy's programming skills, skipper.”
“Roger that,” Forrest said with a sigh. “Bring us in, but I want a complete scan of that platform on our way in and don't skimp on scanning elsewhere, especially in and around the gas giant's debris ring.”
“Affirmative, sir,” Lieutenant Thomas nodded. The Bowie's sensors were about as good as they could make, with both active and passive sensors. The destroyer had been designed to screen larger ships and scout potential systems. This is our mission, he told himself.
Yet he couldn't help the feeling that this situation wasn't ideal. He'd had time to talk with Alannis back at the Tanis system before this mission. She'd warned him that Reese would be prepared for the people hunting him.
This wasn't a straightforward mission. They weren't scanning for pirates or Chxor or even a normal human opponent. They were playing cat and mouse with a man whose motivations were unclear and whose end-goal was unknown.
And the aliens who destroyed an entire star system are involved...
Forrest looked over at Lieutenant Tyler Pape and Ensign Stephanie Osborne on weapons, “I want all offensive systems at full readiness as well.”
The two tactical officers nodded, their faces intent as they readied the Bowie for combat. He felt fairly confident with their abilities, even so, he hoped that neither of them would need to fire at all.
“Sir,” Lieutenant Thomas looked up, “the ansible platform just went active. We're being hit by active radar!”
Forrest bit his lip. In theory, that meant the platform could relay their location and details about the ship through the ansible. Reese wouldn't be able to do anything about it, not right away, but he would know they were here. Any ships receiving the ansible's warning would take days to arrive to the system. But he could order the platform to self-destruct, Forrest thought. Hopefully they'd be able to download the platform's data before he could give that order. This just became a race, he thought.
“I'm sensing the platform's fusion drive spiking, sir,” Lieutenant Thomas said, confirming Forrest's guess.
“Full acceleration,” Forrest said, “least time intercept. Get us to that platform, now.”
The Bowie leapt to full acceleration. They had already drawn close to the platform, now they'd arrive in only three minutes, hopefully in time to prevent the platform from destroying itself.
Forrest opened a channel to his engineer, “Lieutenant Medica, I want you or whoever you're sending suited up and ready to go over. Warrant Officer Heady, prep your shuttle--”
“Sir, targeting radar!”
Forrest's head snapped around. That was impossible, it meant there was an enemy ship hidden near the platform's orbit. The other ship must have waited for them to come in at full acceleration, where they'd be hard pressed to avoid a full engagement, which meant--
“Missile launch!” Lieutenant Thomas shouted. “Thirty seconds to impact!”
“Hard to starboard!” Forrest snapped, “Roll twenty degrees, engage with point defense cannons!”
He blanched as he saw just how many missiles were headed their way. Lieutenant Thomas still hadn't identified the source of the missile launch, but it was likely that there were two or more ships.
The Bowie's point defense cannons opened fire. The six rotary thirty-millimeter cannons sprayed defensive fire as the enemy missiles swept in. A second later, Lieutenant Thomas identified the three ships, hidden just below the debris ring band, that had fired those missiles. All three vessels had gone to full acceleration, their vectors set to match that of the Bowie. There was no way that his ship could elude those three ships, not at this range. “Lieutenant Pape, engage target alpha,” Forrest snapped.
He flipped a toggle on his console, “Transmit via ansible, priority alpha, Bowie is under attack, estimate three, I say again, three light cruisers of unknown make...”
The Bowie lurched as a missile detonated in close proximity.
“Three cruisers,” Forre
st continued, “probable time to their weapons range is fifteen seconds. We will engage, but it looks like he knew we were coming. Bowie out.”
“Roll ship, fifteen degrees, rotate to heading five-five-nine, full acceleration!” Forrest snapped. He saw the helmsman's head come around in shock. “Do it now!” Forrest barked.
The helmsman reacted instantly and the Bowie rotated and the drives went to full. They weren't trying to evade, they were diving at the enemy now. Their only chance was to flash past the enemy quickly and to hit them hard and hope that the enemy couldn't do the same.
The Bowie lurched again as they began to take fire from all three ships. The enemy cruisers mounted railguns and mass drivers and the Bowie's defense screens began to lose efficiency as the high-velocity projectiles slammed through, dispersing the ionized gas with each impact. “Defense screens at thirty percent!” Forrest's XO snapped.
“Hit, multiple hits on target alpha!” Lieutenant Pape called out. “We got him--”
Something slammed into the Bowie and the entire ship shuddered. A moment later, the forward bulkhead exploded. Fire control vanished in the detonation, Lieutenant Pape and Ensign Osborn killed instantly. Shards of metal slashed across the bridge and Forrest saw Lieutenant Thomas's head split like a melon as something struck him.
The explosion ripped Forrest's command chair out of its mounting and the last thing Forrest saw was the rear bulkhead coming at him like a flyswatter.
***
767A36 System
Unclaimed Space
December 5, 2409
Lieutenant Alannis Giovanni watched with dry eyes as the recovery shuttle docked. “Recovery team back aboard, sir,” Alannis said. Her voice sounded wooden even to her. “They report no survivors aboard the wreckage of the Bowie.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Captain Beeson's voice held passionate anger. “Have they recovered all the remains?”
“Yes, sir, all that...” Alannis's voice broke a bit, “all the remains that they could locate.” The Bowie had run into a close ambush by three enemy cruisers. The destroyer looked like it had been chewed upon by some titanic creature. Large sections of the ship were simply gone. “They also recovered the ship's black boxes. Initial data seems to confirm our sensor analysis, three Independence-class cruisers, the Bowie took out one of them.”
“Preliminary analysis indicates it was the Avalanche,” Lieutenant Tim Gray spoke up. “Which matches data from the Shogunate and Admiral Collae's people that indicated the Avalanche is working for Reese Leone.”
Alannis let out an angry breath as she considered that. The ansible platform here had been a trap, designed to ambush anyone who came after Reese. The cold-blooded destruction of the Bowie was a thing of calculation. Reese had as much as murdered the crew, not to accomplish a military goal or to achieve some political end. Reese had done it as a warning: don't come after me.
The reports so far suggested that there might have been some survivors, crew who'd survived the vessel's savage wounds, yet there couldn't be many. It looked as if the two enemy cruisers had boarded the wreckage of the Bowie. They had found signs of hatches forced open as well as a handful of crew killed while resisting the boarding. The boarders had headed for the bridge and engineering, where they'd salvaged the antimatter reactor and other valuable components. They hadn't been able to get anything from the bridge, the damage there had destroyed the ship's computer core and most of its backup systems as well as cutting even emergency power to that part of the ship.
And Forrest was on the bridge, a voice whispered in the back of her mind. Forrest, with who her friendship had evolved into something more... and Reese had killed him.
Some part of her wanted to hold out hope that he might have survived, but she'd seen the images of the Bowie's bridge deck. A direct hit had destroyed a third of the compartment and body recovery could only do so much when starship's weapons could vaporize flesh, blood, and bone.
Even if Forrest had survived that hit, several of the crew had been killed as the Bowie spun in its death throes, flinging debris and bodies into the void. The Constellation had recovered a few of those bodies, but the personal transponders could have been damaged.
No, more likely than not, they'd never find Forrest's remains.
“Alright,” Captain Beeson said, “stand down from recovery operations. Bridge crew, return to your standard schedules.” His eyes swept the room and he met Alannis’s gaze and held it as he spoke, “What happened here is a tragedy, but we'll make those who did it pay, understand?”
No one spoke, but Alannis gave him a slow nod. This wasn't a war-time attack, this wasn't nation-on-nation. This was personal. I'm going to find you, Reese, she thought. When she did, she was going to make damned certain he couldn't hurt anyone ever again.
***
“How you holding up?” Lizmadie asked Alannis as she came back to their shared quarters. Lieutenant Meyer was softly snoring on her bunk, not that Alannis could blame her. The communications officer had been the one to first receive the distress call and as far as Alannis knew, the woman hadn't slept much over the past fifteen days.
“I'm fine,” Alannis snapped.
“You're a liar,” Lizmadie sighed.
“That's, you're a liar, ma'am,” Alannis grated.
“Not under these circumstances,” Lizmadie's eyes narrowed. “Right now this is princess-to-princess talk. I know you and Forrest Perkins were close...”
“We'd been dating,” Alannis interrupted. “So what?”
“You were more than that,” Lizmadie gave her a level look. “I saw some of the messages you and he sent one another. I heard the way your voice got excited when you spoke to him. You were falling for him, weren't you?”
“I am not going to have this conversation right now,” Alannis growled.
“Yes,” Lizmadie snapped, “you are. Because if you don't have it now, it's going to fester inside you. You lost someone that you'd allowed yourself to care about. You think I don't know how you're feeling?” Lizmadie glared at her, the younger woman's anger shone through her expression.
Alannis couldn't meet that anger for long. “Yeah,” she admitted, “you do know what I feel.” Of anyone, Lizmadie would. She'd lost not just her father, the Emperor and her older half-brother, but before that she'd lost everyone she knew, killed in a brutal fashion while she watched. Alannis let out a tense breath, “I blame myself. Maybe if I hadn't been close to Forrest...”
“Bullshit,” Lizmadie snapped. “The only difference that would have made would be that he wouldn't have had the time he did with you. It might not have hit you as hard then...”
“I feel guilty because I wish it hadn't hit me at all,” Alannis ground out, closing her eyes against the tears. “Damn me, but I wish I didn't care. I wish I didn't have the guilt and pain of yet another death. Maybe if I didn't care about him, then...” She trailed off, the ache too raw to continue.
“Then you could just do your job? You could shut off all your emotions?” Lizmadie's voice was intent. She already knew, Alannis could tell, but she wanted Alannis to say it aloud.
“No,” Alannis said softly, “then I wouldn't hate myself so much for making Reese behave this way.”
“It isn't your fault,” Lizmadie said. “You didn't put the bottle in his hands when his life fell apart. You didn't put a gun to Reese's head and force him to hack your implant. I was there. I watched his descent into drink and one bad decision after another. Could you have handled your final confrontation better?” Her friend shrugged, “Who knows? You're only human, Alannis. You couldn't know that he'd go to Admiral Mannetti. From there... well, Reese has made his own decisions.”
“If I'd just listened to him, maybe compromised a bit more,” Alannis said, “I feel like maybe...”
“Don't you dare,” Lizmadie snapped. “You're one of the strongest, most confident women I know. Don't you dare start to doubt yourself! If you hadn't worn the uniform, would the Ghornath have ever returned to th
eir Sacred Stars? If you hadn't been there to help Tony and I, we might never have prevented the Dreyfus Coup! You wear the uniform and that is nothing to regret. Reese made his decisions, not you. And all the weight of those bad decisions lies on him. Don't you ever start to believe that you made the wrong decision by wanting to serve.” Lizmadie leaned forward, “I don't say this lightly, Alannis, but Reese wasn't even a quarter of the officer that you already are.”
Alannis's shoulders straightened a bit and she wiped at the tears on her face. “Thanks.”
“No problem, pep talks are what I'm supposed to be good at,” Lizmadie grinned. “Comes with the territory, you know.”
“Which territory is that?” Alannis asked, “Princess, Marine Officer, or best friend?”
Lizmadie only nodded, “Yes.”
***
Tanis System
Independent
December 23, 2409
“We too ran into an ambush at the Vega system,” Kaigun Motogami reported as the group of senior officers holograms appeared on Senior Captain Daniel Beeson's desk display. “We lost the destroyer Kisaragi and took damage to the cruiser Hayate, but we managed to drive off our attackers.”
“Our attackers disengaged,” Admiral Collae said, “as soon as they saw our numbers. The enemy detonated the ansible platform, however.” The Colonial Republic officer’s harsh face and voice suggested that he would have preferred the enemy to try an ambush.
Daniel nodded at that. The enemy ships had destroyed the ansible platform in the 767A36 system. The wreckage of the Avalanche had been scuttled as well, which took away any chances of identifying where it had been resupplied from.
“It seems we've exhausted our current leads, then,” Chairman-Admiral Ortega said.
“All indications are that Reese Leone intends to attack the blockade at Kapteyn's Star in order to access the Temple of Light,” Admiral Collae growled. “We should therefore coordinate with the Centauri Confederation. Alert them to this fact and see if they have any data that would help us to track him down.”
