“I wouldn’t have it any other way, ma’am. Good thing we involved ourselves in all the festivities up to now, isn’t it?”
“We’ve got the experience and we know what to look for. I’m going to find the commander and see if she has any special instructions for us. Meet me back on the bridge at 1800.”
“Acknowledged.” Winchester lingered after the Minstrel’s captain excused herself. She was absolutely right. There were too many ships and too many battle groups on the screen to comprehend. The ground units were enough to comprise half the Core Alliance infantry. When Winchester tapped on one of the units assigned to G Corps, the loadout and order of battle nearly filled the screen. There were SX12 recon trackers and SX15 superheavy tanks. There were mobile rocket batteries and surface-to-orbit anti-spacecraft units. The marines were outfitted with the heaviest man-portable anti-armor weapons available. They had phosphor-ignition grenades, explosive-shell kinetic repeater cannons and the heaviest combination personal armor and exo-frames. A marine equipped with just the standard loadout could eradicate an army of 100 men and a half-dozen five story buildings before lifting half-ton pieces of the rubble and throwing them sixty yards to smash their transports.
Then there were the mechs. Unlike Argent’s compact paladin models, the marines of G Corps fielded the heaviest surface attack platforms. Some of the capital units stood fifteen stories tall and mounted guns, proximity energy and missile weapons that could only be accurately described as theater-wide siege platforms. Some could easily be mistaken for mobile fire bases. The largest had independently operational repair facilities and could establish semi-permanent power facilities at arbitrary locations above or below sea level.
Winchester had always had a keen interest in the dynamics of surface warfare. He was a student of military science, after all. Although he had performed magnificently at the Academy and risen to an executive officer’s billet in near-record-time, he always had a streak of impatience at the fact he only needed to demonstrate a mastery of fleet operations in order to earn his rank and assignment. He knew he would be a fine marine officer if he were called upon to fight on the ground. He just needed the time and the ambition to learn as much about surface combat as he had learned about space warfare.
But he also knew he had a duty. Despite its light tonnage and small size, DSS Minstrel was going to be called upon to perform unique missions in the upcoming conflict. Her reputation as the “Firecracker Frigate” was not just a flippant way to make sport of the fact she was only an escort ship. The achievements and exploits of Commander Islington had made their way throughout the fleet. The victories earned by her tiny ship and its overachieving crew had become a big morale boost for the rest of the fleet and, to a certain extent, the marines as well. Skywatch was going to need all the help it could get. The wall of red indicators they faced only one star system away was all the proof Lieutenant Winchester needed.
He remembered well the stories his father told around the dinner table. Benjamin Winchester served as an enlisted marine during First Praetorian. He was assigned to an ammunition relay dump on one of the more obscure bodies in the Gitairn region. Nobody expected it to become a target until the morning it was no longer a rear echelon camp. It took all of an hour for Winchester’s company to go from moving gear to fighting for their lives. They were victorious, but Sergeant Winchester had left behind the use of his right hand. The one thing Josiah remembered throughout his childhood were the repeated attempts to reinforce the mangled skeletal structure with pins, artificial bones, mechanical devices, bionics and exo-frames. None restored the full use of his father’s fingers. The bionics and the exo-frame were partially successful. Josiah always had the ultimate trump card when it came to playground one-upmanship throughout his schooling. He was the only kid with a father who had a robotic hand.
After the Alliance had formed and defeated what turned out to be an ill-advised attack by a less advanced military eager to declare itself a galactic power, the human worlds believed there would be peace for some time. The Star Empire was the only militarily aggressive race near the Core Worlds. Their defeat meant humanity would have a belligerent neighbor, but future conflicts would not involve war on an interstellar scale.
Until now.
It remained to be seen what the Sarn wanted badly enough to risk a second major war in such a relatively short time. Humanity might be called upon to not only break their fleet but their civilian populations as well. As long as they were capable of building advanced starships, the Sarn would remain a threat, at least as the alarmist politicians saw it. Winchester hoped he wouldn’t be called upon to attack civilian targets for the sake of dismantling Sarn heavy manufacturing. He didn’t become a Skywatch officer to attack defenseless populations.
For now, he would have to put his personal opinions aside. He had duties to perform, and war had already been declared.
Fifteen
Captain Hunter sipped his drink. It was one of his long-standing post-mission rituals. The old-fashioned glass made it all worthwhile. The scene outside his quarters was as beautiful as it was awe-inspiring. The captain had never seen stars and constellations shift position relative to his ship so quickly before. He would never be able to express how grateful he was to have noticed Yili Curtiss and her unusual personality when he was recruiting pilots for his squadron.
The Jack of Spades rarely spoke in those days. She preferred to communicate through her work. Hunter would often wander off to find someone to fix a gizmo or malfunctioning system on his fighter only to return and find it already working. When asked, Yili would just shrug. She never made eye contact. She was always busy with a technical manual or a little mechanism or something. Her attention always gravitated to the details.
It wasn’t until she offered a meticulous answer to a technical question posed by a senior officer that Jason Hunter knew he had found his future chief engineer. When he was a flight leader, higher ranking officers were always looking for an excuse to take him and his squadron down a peg. Since they knew the captain wasn’t balancing on the cutting edge of current engineering theory, that was often where they would probe for weakness. Yili Curtiss put an end to those forced interrogations. She always had the right answer. In one particular case, she left a working model of the answer on a command officer’s desk during lunch. Everyone got their ass chewed for that one, but Hunter still gave Yili a high-five for it later.
In the space of what seemed like only months, Curtiss and Hunter’s chief signals officer Zony Tixia had independently invented an autonomous weapons platform, faster than light travel and the ability to transport both men and equipment from ship to surface and back. They had also almost single-handedly figured out the Ithis riddle and saved his ship from being captured by the Sarn a few months before an interstellar war. Hunter couldn’t be entirely sure, but he was beginning to suspect he had made a couple of pretty good hires.
The doorbell sounded.
“Come.”
The hatch slid away. Zony was rocking back and forth on her heels with an entirely unregulation grin on her face. “Hi.”
“Evening, commander. Would you like a drink?”
“I would love a drink.” She bounced on the captain’s bed and flopped herself back with her arms splayed over her head. “Isn’t it great? We’re going to be at Rho Theta in 11 hours!”
Hunter handed Zony his other old-fashioned glass. It contained three ice cubes and two fingers of scotch whisky. “I was just contemplating our good fortune. It’s a fine thing we can count on mighty intellects to solve our problems like this, because boy do we have a lot of them.”
Zony sat up. “You’ve been pretty quiet about what happened on the Achaen Station.”
Hunter settled into his reading chair. It was essentially an advanced-looking but bog-standard living room recliner frozen at exactly the right angle to make reading comfortable. “I’m still trying to reconcile what we know about Atlantis with what I just learned from Gin.”
&
nbsp; “The stories are all so spooky. I’m surprised anyone wants to talk about it.”
“There’s a lot more going on out there, Zony. That portal is only the tip of the iceberg. He was talking about shamans and mind magic. It didn’t sound like an advanced species at all. It sounded like they were practicing some kind of witchcraft.”
“Those voices you heard sounded like it to me,” Zony said. “I’ve been over those readings a half-dozen times now and I can’t find anything to add to what you entered in the log. There weren’t any kinetic readings at all. No air was moving over there aside from what you were displacing by simply standing there and breathing. There’s no scientific explanation for sound without air displacement.”
“There’s no scientific explanation for portals to imaginary re-enactments of World War 2 either, but that’s what I was offered. Operation Wolfsbane is what Gin called it. I was struck by the name because I remember from my military science studies the German armed forces in the second world war seemed to be fond of wolf imagery. It sounds like the kind of thing the allied high command would come up with if they were sending someone after the Axis in a covert operation.”
“One of the scientists on the station actually took Gin up on this crazy idea?”
“Apparently they all did to one extent or another. It could take years to track them all down. We might not have a choice, though. They took all their research with them, apparently, including everything they knew about the alloy, the effects of the metal on the minds of the people on the station and every scrap of data they had gathered over all this time. Achae is the space station farthest from Core Space. It represents the edge of our reach into the unknown. Took years just to transport the equipment to get the place set up. It would have taken us forever to even navigate this far without Yili’s inventions.”
“We need a science ship. That way we can really figure out what’s happening and have all the equipment we need to study it. Argent’s big and she’s tough, but we’re not built for research and finding the answers.”
“Are we really as warlike as Gin says?”
Zony took a sip. “I think humans are just beings. You don’t tolerate unfairness very well.”
“He offered me a girl as a new bride if I would lead an assault on a castle.” Hunter took a sip of his drink to give Zony room to gasp. She didn’t disappoint.
“That must be how he lured them all into that doorway! How do you even know she was real?”
“She wasn’t. I can understand how his visions would affect men that far from home, though. It isn’t difficult to find someone’s weakness if you can just reach into their mind. Maybe they misinterpreted their madness as something caused by the metal or the station’s structure. That’s not our biggest problem, however.”
“If you think that Gin guy might be helping our enemies, I think you’re right.”
“What do you suppose he offered them? His ‘species’ wants the truth. They want to know which is stronger. Why not bribe the Sarn first, get them all wound up for a fight and then turn them loose? It explains Bayone Three. It explains their attack on us and it explains the massacre of Task Force 92. They’ve been itching for a fight and now maybe we know why.”
“Do you suppose Gin’s species is on the ground on M-Ceti Four? It seems to me that’s where the hostilities started. Maybe they weren’t enough to drive them into a second Praetorian War, but by the sound of it they were enough to get the ball rolling.”
“What if Gin just recruited a bunch of our enemies and turned them loose on us as a test? There are all kinds of ways to interpret what is happening, and now that we know they are involved, most of them don’t sound like he’s on our side.”
“He’s not on anyone’s side maybe,” Zony replied. “Maybe he’s just bored.”
Hunter got up and poured himself another. He walked over and re-filled Zony’s glass. “I like the way you think,” he said before putting the bottle back and taking his seat again. “I wonder how bored he would be if we went back to Atlantis and pointed a few of our pointy things at him?”
Zony giggled. “I bet Gin wouldn’t be quite so enthusiastic if the war showed up on his front porch right before dinner.”
“Something’s going on in the Atlantis Sector, commander. But we can’t do much about it until we figure out a way to put a stop to what’s about to happen.”
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Operation Wolfsbane Page 9
