Rolfson’s voice was utterly flat. Cold. His tone said everything he needed to say about the concept of slavery or mass murder.
“What happens if it is the Kanzi?” Amanda asked.
“War,” Rolfson replied. “We will send all of our data to the Sol starcom via hyperfold relay for transmission to the Empress. The full response to this is the Imperium’s business.”
He shook his head.
“There does not appear to be anything more we can do here,” he concluded grimly. “Ms. Camber, we will be transferring you and the rest of the survivors to two of our cruisers. They will carry you all back to Asimov.
“I’ll have some personal messages for you to deliver as well, but we owe all of the survivors safety and protection.”
“What about you?” she asked.
“This Fleet will proceed to Lelldorin and the other colony systems closer to the Kanzi border,” he said grimly. “We will make certain no other world suffers Powell’s fate, and we will demand answers from the Kanzi.
“One way or another.”
Chapter Six
“Attention! Terra arriving!”
None of the Imperial Marines lining the path between the space shuttle and the exit deeper into the space station were human. The officer snapping orders was one of the A!Tol, a massive female towering over two and a half meters tall in her heavy power armor.
The troops themselves were a mix of Tosumi and Yin. Both species were avian in appearance, though the Yin were taller and generally more human-looking despite their fine blue feathers. The Tosumi were squat creatures with vestigial wings, but they were also one of the Imperial Races—species the A!Tol had learned uplifting on.
The Imperial Races’ original cultures hadn’t survived. Outside of the inevitable differences around sexuality and relationships, the Tosumi functionally had the same culture as the A!Tol.
The A!Tol might forgive themselves for the destruction of those cultures. Eventually. Maybe.
Duchess Annette Bond wasn’t taking bets on when. She returned the salutes of the Imperial Marines as she walked forward into DragonWorks Station, a quartet of the Ducal Guard following her off the shuttle in their own power armor.
She’d had access to Imperial-level medicine since well before she’d returned to Earth and, despite being closer to seventy than sixty, felt healthier than she had at forty. The pair of fifteen-year-old twins causing havoc back on Earth spoke to her health in her fifties, if nothing else.
That thought brought a smile to her face and carried her to the end of the ceremonial guard, where three people were waiting for her. The central figure was a glittering-carapaced sentient that resembled an upright scarab beetle. Standing to the right of the Laian station head was a human in a business suit, managing to look both neatly dressed and awkward in a way she’d only ever seen engineers master.
To the Laian’s left was a young human in the uniform of the Imperial Navy, with the simple silver circle insignia of a Lesser Commander. That was a new rank since the last time she’d seen him, and she gave them all a smile.
“Dockmaster Orentel,” she greeted the Laian. Orentel had once served as the senior shipyard manager for the semi-pirate Laian group that ran the station the humans called Tortuga. She and her mate, somewhat ostracised by their people due to monogamy being out of the norm for Laians, had led the portion of the exiles that had immigrated to Earth.
“Dilip.” She turned to the engineer. Dilip Narang had worked for her husband for decades at Nova Industries and then been poached by the Imperium and the Duchy to help run DragonWorks.
Her brightest smile, however, was directed at the young Japanese man in the Imperial uniform.
“Lesser Commander Tanaka,” she greeted him. “It’s good to see you, Hiro. How’s your mother?”
Harriet Tanaka, once a battleship commander for the United Earth Space Force, had been the first human officer to put on an Imperial uniform. She’d done it to get treatment for then-ten-year-old Hiro Tanaka’s rare cancer.
Somehow, no one had been surprised when the son had followed the mother into Imperial service.
“She’s doing well,” the younger Tanaka told her. “She sends her regrets for not meeting you in person, but given the circumstances, she didn’t want to leave her flagship.”
The vestige of pleasure and humor Annette had summoned fled her and she fell back into her “iron-faced ruler” mode as she nodded and glanced at the two sentients who ran the research station.
“Let’s get to your confidential meeting room,” she ordered. “Harriet and I need to make sure we’re on the same page here, and I want to pick the DragonWorks’ collective brain.”
If history had taught her anything, it was that there was never only going to be one crisis.
Annette stepped into the conference room and stopped short. Despite everything going on, the view from the window that covered one wall of the room was still jaw-dropping.
DragonWorks Station didn’t orbit Jupiter. DragonWorks Station was inside Jupiter, in a ten-thousand-kilometer bubble of space held open by the application of massive shield generators. The gas giant’s famous Red Spot was around and above them, swirling storms of gas and energy that shone a blood-red light through the window.
Taking a deep breath, she stepped over to the end of the long wooden table and waited for everyone else to be seated. A faint haze shimmered over the window as a privacy shield engaged, and a new figure appeared in one of the empty chairs.
Fleet Lord Harriet Tanaka was present only by hologram, but she gave Annette an abbreviated bow and nodded firmly to her son.
“This is your meeting, Duchess Bond,” Tanaka said calmly, the petite Japanese woman still looking as young and healthy as ever. Annette envied her. Medical care or no, she was certain she didn’t look as good as the Imperial officer did.
“And we’re here to make sure you’re involved,” Annette told her. “There are Gold Dragon–secured rooms on Earth, but none of them have the communications infrastructure to reach your flagship.”
Tanaka nodded. Her super-battleship flagship—indeed, the entire Imperial Seventy-Seventh Fleet—was hidden in the pocket with DragonWorks Station.
“This meeting room is now secured under Gold Dragon protocols,” Dilip Narang announced, the dark-skinned and graying engineer looking tired. “We’ve all been briefed on the basics of what happened at Powell, so as Fleet Lord Tanaka pointed out, this is your meeting, Duchess.”
“Powell was a fucking massacre,” Annette said flatly. “I have a TDC team currently reviewing if the impact winter is going to be minor enough for it to be worth returning anytime in our lifetimes, but…” She shook her head. “That’s a secondary concern.
“As we speak, Empress A!Shall has summoned the Kanzi ambassador to demand answers,” she continued.
“And all Navy stations are on full alert,” Tanaka told them. “Squadrons are being deployed forward to the border. The Imperium is preparing for war.”
“Are we ready?” Annette asked. “I know Bellerophon is the only fully Gold Dragon–equipped ship we have, and she’s Militia still.”
“It’s been twelve years since we rolled out hyperfold coms to the entire Navy,” Orentel reminded them with a shrug of her multiple shoulders. “We’ve quietly deployed many of the Green Dragon systems through the fleet. The Vindication- and Integrity-class ships are fully equipped with hyperfold beams, and we’ve deployed almost sixty of those two designs across the Imperium.
“Few of the Black Dragon systems are worthwhile on their own.” The Laian spread her claws wide in acceptance. “The Imperium is not prepared to embrace weapons systems that reduce their pilots’ life expectancies by years for every hour they’re deployed. Starfighters will remain a Wendira innovation.”
Annette nodded. That had been the expectation, but after the Alpha Centauri incident, the Imperium had had vast quantities of sensor data on the Wendira attack parasites and a number of mostly intact samples. H
umanity was close enough to their carrier and jet-fighter days that she knew her people had pushed hard to try and find a usable space fighter.
The three tiers of work done at DragonWorks were Green, Black and Gold Dragon. Green Dragon was the tech everyone knew the Imperium was working on somewhere, evolutions of the hyperfold coms the Mesharom had given them and similar next-generation systems.
Black Dragon systems were the systems their closer enemies and allies probably guessed they were working on. Matter-conversion power technology, stolen from the Reshmiri. Starfighter technology, stolen from the Wendira. Hyperspace missile and tachyon sensor technology, stolen from the Mesharom.
Gold Dragon was the tech they hoped even the Mesharom didn’t know they had, the systems and science based on the survey and samples of the Precursor ship humanity had given up to that ancient race.
“So, we have Green Dragon tech available to most formations, but not Black or Gold,” Annette concluded. “Do we know anything about the weapons systems and stealth fields used at Powell?”
Narang shook his head.
“No, and that’s weird,” he told them softly. “We don’t have a lot of data, but we should be able to at least ID the systems. Beyond the use of point eight five interface-drive missiles, we can’t.”
The Imperium had upgraded to a point eight cee missile in the last decade. Point eight five was the theoretical maximum, currently a Core World exclusive—though DragonWorks was working on that.
“The records are pretty close up to the destruction of several of the orbital platforms,” Tanaka pointed out. “We should know what was used there.”
“And we don’t,” Narang repeated. “It was outside our experience. Outside any Imperial record.”
That sent a chill down Annette’s spine. Something sounded familiar there, but she couldn’t place it.
“I guess that’s a problem for the Navy,” she said quietly. “What about the other Bellerophons?”
“Herakles and Perseus are beginning their trials as we speak,” Orentel told her. “We can accelerate them and have them ready for deployment in a week or two, but that is a risk.”
“They’re Militia ships, not mine,” Tanaka said. “The decision is yours, Annette.”
“Accelerate them,” Annette ordered. “We’ll hold them in Sol for the moment as we try and work out what the hell is going on. Rolfson may need more support than even our worst fears; having another pair of Gold Dragon battleships ready to back him up is the best we can do.”
“What about Bellerophon?” Tanaka asked. “We can reach them via the starcom. Do we brief Captain Vong, at least?”
“He’ll have twice the detail we can send him by starcom from the hyperfold network as soon as he arrives in Asimov,” Annette pointed out. “That’s less than a day. I trust Vong’s judgment.”
She might not be willing to influence Morgan’s career, but she’d still be damned if she’d let her stepdaughter serve on the ship of someone she didn’t trust.
“So, we wait?” Narang asked.
“We wait,” Annette confirmed. “We see what Rolfson finds at Lelldorin and we see what the High Priestess and the Empress discuss.
“We wait,” she echoed. “And we prepare for war.”
Chapter Seven
“Battery Charlie-Six is still lagging behind everyone else,” Morgan reported crisply. She stood in front of Commander Masters’s desk as they went over the daily report. She’d been invited to sit, but she actually thought better standing.
“That’s four of our hyperfold cannons,” Masters pointed out. “Even a few seconds off sequence could undercut a bombardment intended to bring down a target shield.”
“Depending on which tests we’re looking at, they’re as much as five seconds off,” she told her boss. The numbers were being projected on the wall, but she wasn’t looking at them. She’d written the report summarizing the last three days’ worth of tests that she’d supervised, plus the two weeks before she’d arrived.
“They’re the last to arrive after general quarters and take a noticeably longer time to respond to commands from the bridge,” she continued. “Ninety-plus percent of the time, the battery is firing in central control and it won’t matter, but…the other ten percent of the time, Charlie-Six could get us in serious trouble.”
Masters nodded, the tanned officer studying her levelly.
“You’ve been running the tests these last few days and you have Yu’s notes,” he said. “What do you think the problem is?”
Morgan looked back at her boss and snorted.
“I think you already know the answer,” she told him. “But it wasn’t in Yu’s notes.”
The Commander chuckled.
“I have my own suspicions, but I want to hear what you think,” he replied.
“Petty Officer Stevens is making no attempt to cover up her team’s shortfall,” Morgan said. “She honestly seems more frustrated by the problem than I am, and her previous record is impeccable. Normally, I’d expect a problem like this to be the PO.”
“Not the battery crew themselves?” Masters asked.
“While I’m sure there is theoretically such a thing as a bad crew, my experience is that a good noncom can get acceptable work out of even the worst teams,” she told him. “None of the files for Charlie-Six’s crew suggest the kind of endemic discipline or training problem that would explain this kind of shortcoming.”
“So?”
“I went and physically watched them for the last scramble drill,” Morgan said. “Charlie-Six is at the rear of the ship, positioned in the rear armament arch.” She shook her head. “Those crew were coming in at an outright run, sir, trying to make the time. That battery is the most awkwardly positioned weapons position on the ship, sir, with the only nearby ship transit car crossing through all of Engineering.
“Unless PO Stevens’s crew were literally sleeping at their guns, they couldn’t man the battery in time. I double-checked their detailed scores—they start every exercise behind but catch up to the standard by the end. They’re out of breath, sir, from running to try and make the scramble time.”
Masters laughed and clapped gently.
“I didn’t even think of the possibility that they were out of breath,” he admitted. “I’d run the ship schematics and realized the scramble problem. So, Lieutenant Commander Casimir, what would you recommend?”
“There’s a limit to what we can do without building a new transit tube,” Morgan told him. “We can do some rerouting, but I ran some models and they don’t buy the crews enough time. Looking at the schematics, there’s a reason the tubes run that way, but I think the engineers need to get that fixed for the next generation of the ships.”
“Put together a proposal and we’ll make sure it makes it back to DragonWorks,” Masters ordered. “We’re not far from going into mass production on the class, so let’s make sure our ships are worth their weight when we piss off everyone.”
Morgan chuckled. Commander Masters had clearly been briefed on the degree to which the Gold Dragon–level technology had been stolen, hidden or otherwise acquired in ways that were going to anger the Core Powers once unveiled. She doubted he really grasped the true depth of it. Morgan wasn’t sure she grasped the true depth of it, and she’d listened to her stepmother and Admiral Rolfson discuss how to keep the Precursor tech underlying some of Bellerophon’s systems secret from the Mesharom.
“That doesn’t help us for today, though,” she noted. “We need that crew on their guns in under ninety seconds and we need them there without having to sprint.” Morgan smiled. “Fortunately for everyone, there’s a set of engineering rating berths at the base of the rear armament arch. I’m relatively sure we can move those crew to somewhere they can still reach their stations in time…and if we put Charlie-Six’s crew there, they should be able to make their stations from their racks in under sixty seconds.
“Without running.”
Her boss considered her in silence for a
minute.
“Show me,” he ordered. “I’ll raise it with Commander Nguyen. We need that scramble time, Casimir. Let’s make it happen.”
That was the first time he’d called her by anything except her rank. She hoped that was a good sign.
Back in her quarters, Morgan took a deep breath as she checked the time. In theory, she was supposed to have a minimum of twelve hours between shifts. In practice, well, those rules applied as well for starship officers as they’d applied for officers of any stripe in history. Regs kept at least sixteen hours between her bridge watches, but given the number of other duties the second-ranked officer in a battleship’s tactical department had…
She was due on the bridge in six hours, just before they arrived in Asimov. The siren call of sleep, however, was interrupted by a notification on the console in her quarters. Mail call.
Bellerophon, like every other capital ship in the Imperium, had both hyperfold communicators and a starcom receiver. Without a transmitter, the starcom could only receive messages, but that meant that they could get mail from home, even if they couldn’t easily reply to it.
Morgan hit the command to play the message without checking to see who it was from and then inhaled sharply as the pale skin and red hair of her girlfriend, Christie Torres, appeared above the hologram projector.
“Hi, Morgan,” Christie said. “I got your note. Really?”
Morgan didn’t even need to wait for her girlfriend to continue before she winced.
“Almost a year we’ve been together,” the redhead noted. “A year, and all I get before you’re aboard ship and headed out-system is a fucking text message?” She shook her head. “I would think I deserved better than that, but it’s pretty typical of you, isn’t it? I didn’t get treated much better when you were aboard Ottawa, did I? Guess I was just too shiny-eyed then.”
The naval officer lowered herself into her chair gingerly as Christie continued. She wasn’t going to pretend she didn’t deserve the lecture. Their relationship had been shaky for a while, and Morgan knew damn well it was her fault.
Darkness Beyond (Light of Terra: a Duchy of Terra series Book 1) Page 4
