This time, it had been outside her control. She couldn’t say the same for the other times she’d done something similar.
“We’re done, Morgan,” Christie told her. “When I actually get to see you, you’re great, and there’s definitely a charm to dating the Duchess’s stepdaughter, but…fuck, woman, you are the most frustrating lover I’ve ever had.
“We’re done,” she repeated. “I’ll mail the shit you left at my apartment to your parents. Somehow, I’m sure I can find the address. Don’t contact me. I won’t answer.”
The hologram froze as the recording ended, and Morgan sighed. She stared at the image of her now ex-girlfriend for several seconds, then disappeared it with a wave of her hand and went digging into the drawers for the medkit.
She wasn’t going to sleep without help after that, and, well, she was due on the bridge in six hours.
Chapter Eight
Morgan had seen more hyperspace emergences than she could count, as a passenger in her teens and then as an officer aboard a patrolling destroyer. There was still something awe-inspiring to her in the sight of the exotic-matter arrays lighting up with power and tearing a hole back into reality.
Hyperspace was an ever-fluctuating gray nothingness to human eyes, but the bright blue Cherenkov radiation from the hyper portal still lit it up. Reality was visible through the highlighted portal for the handful of seconds before the ship slipped through the hole it had torn in hyperspace.
Then Bellerophon was in the Asimov System, the battleship swinging toward her destination and bringing up her interface-drive systems.
“Helm, what’s our ETA to the Rimward Station docking facilities?” Captain Vong asked.
“Forty-two minutes at point five cee, sir,” the officer holding down navigation replied.
“Tactical, anything unusual on the screens?”
Morgan was already pulling and cycling the data, but it was Masters’s job to reply to the Captain. Her job right now was to make sure that her boss had the right data…and while there wasn’t anything unusual on their sensors, there was definitely something missing.
“The fleet is gone,” she murmured, highlighting the orbit where Vice Admiral Rolfson’s capital ships should have hung. “Half the cruisers and destroyers are left, but the capital ships have moved out.”
“Well, Tactical?” Vong repeated, and Morgan realized the Captain had probably heard her muttering to Masters.
“Lay it out, Casimir,” her boss ordered, staring at the screen. “You spotted it first.”
She swallowed and turned to look at the Captain. The older Chinese officer looked down at her from his command chair with a gentle smile.
“The Rimward Station Fleet has deployed, sir,” she said crisply. “One of the cruiser squadrons and one of the destroyer squadrons remained behind to protect the system, but the capital ships and half the escorts have left the system, presumably under Admiral Rolfson’s command.”
As she spoke, she was highlighting data and transferring it to the main screen. Masters was adding his own notes and data to it as she did so, but he let her explain it to the Captain.
“Thank you, Lieutenant Commander,” Vong told her. “Well caught. Helm, bring us up to point six cee, if you please. I’d like to know what’s going on sooner rather than later.”
Bellerophon’s regular “flank” speed was point five five lightspeed. She had a point six five lightspeed sprint mode that she could sustain for up to ten minutes. More than that, however, risked both ship and crew.
Point six wasn’t full sprint, but it was definitely hustling for the big ship. Captain Vong was worried.
“Coms, what do we have incoming?” he asked.
“Rimward Station will be aware of our arrival in about fifteen minutes,” the communications officer replied. “I imagine we’ll have hyperfold coms with them shortly afterwards. Vice Admiral Rolfson will almost certainly have left…”
“Lieutenant Commander Antonova?” Vong asked into the sudden silence.
“We just picked up a hyperfold transmission coming into the system, directed towards Rimward Station Command,” the young woman replied. “It’s not coming through our relay network and I’m not familiar with the protocols, but…I think it’s Mesharom?”
“Mesharom?” Vong sounded surprised, which was reasonable. The Mesharom and the A!Tol Imperium got along reasonably well, but the galaxy’s oldest species and greatest Core Power didn’t like each other, let alone anyone else.
“I think it’s Frontier Fleet,” Antonova replied. “I’m not familiar with Mesharom communications.”
“Damn. Do we have anyone who is?” Vong asked.
Morgan swallowed, then slowly raised her hand.
“I’ve worked on Mesharom diplomatic communiqués,” she noted slowly. “I…I’ve also met Mesharom Interpreters.”
The Captain laughed.
“That would make you the only person on this ship, Lieutenant Commander Casimir,” he pointed out. “Antonova, send Casimir the transmission and keep decrypting it.”
The data flowed across Morgan’s screen and she studied it for several seconds. There were patterns to the Mesharom hyperfold protocols. The Imperium and the Duchy of Terra had a lot of the coms protocols, but identifying which one wasn’t… There it was.
Morgan tapped in a series of commands and the communication resolved.
She inhaled sharply as she read the headers, then looked up at the Captain.
“Captain Vong, it’s a Frontier Fleet message, all right,” she confirmed. “It’s a distress signal, requesting immediate assistance from any A!Tol Imperial Navy units.”
Her CO shared her hard swallow as he met her gaze.
“You know the Mesharom better than me,” he admitted slowly. “Is this as strange as I think it is?”
“To my knowledge, sir, the Mesharom Frontier Fleet have never sent a distress signal to an Arm Power military.”
An hour later, Bellerophon rested in orbit above Isaac as replenishment vessels from the support stations swarmed over her. With all of the messages from Admiral Rolfson received, Morgan Casimir found herself unexpectedly pulled into a senior officers’ meeting.
Sitting next to Commander Masters, she calmly concluded that it was in her best interests to sit down, shut up and pay attention. She was pretty sure she knew why Captain Vong had pulled her into the meeting, and her part to play would come.
Vong himself was standing at the front of the conference room, next to a large wallscreen like a stereotypical twentieth-century teacher with a blackboard, studying the information laid out on it with a hawk-like gaze.
“All right, people,” he greeted them without turning around. “We now have all of the information we’re going to have.” He tapped the astrographic chart on the wallscreen, and a three-dimensional version of the local stellar region appeared above the main table.
“Vice Admiral Rolfson left the Powell System for Lelldorin three days ago,” Vong noted, highlighting the two systems in green with a line between them. “Hyperspace currents being what they are, he is anywhere from twelve to seventy-two hours out from Lelldorin.
“He’s been out of communication with the hyperfold relay network, however, for three days, which means we are more up to date on Lelldorin’s status than he is,” the Captain concluded grimly. “There haven’t been any Code Omegas, but no one in Asimov has heard a peep out of the system in two days. It’s not looking good.”
Morgan hadn’t heard that part yet and managed to not audibly react. Lelldorin was slightly less developed than Powell, but still…if the same level of devastation she’d seen in the reports from Powell had been carried out, then another hundred thousand innocents were dead.
“Our orders,” Vong told them, “are to remain here in Asimov and secure the system against any possible threats. That said, my orders are clear that I am not being placed under the command of Rear Admiral Sun and I am to exercise my judgment as to the deployment of Bellerophon until we c
an hear from Admiral Rolfson.”
He let that sink in. Morgan didn’t even need to look up the rank tables to know that Vong was senior to any of the Captains commanding the cruisers and the destroyers. Rear Admiral Sun commanded the cruiser squadron and the Rimward Station, which would normally put Bellerophon under his command.
“This communication from the Mesharom, however, throws everything out of line,” he concluded. “Lieutenant Commander Casimir has personally interacted with the Mesharom and made a study of the Core Powers in general during her time at the Academy. She’s the closest thing we have to an expert on the Mesharom in the system, so I want her to lay out the situation as she understands it. Lieutenant Commander?”
Morgan swallowed, glancing over at Commander Masters who gave her an encouraging nod.
“The background is probably known to everyone,” she said quietly. “There are a number of powers in the Galactic Core who have a significant technological edge over the star nations in the galactic arms. Our own Gold Dragon programs are intended to level that playing field, mostly with stolen technology.
“We believe the Mesharom at least suspect the existence of the Gold Dragon programs, but they’re also the ones we’ve been hiding them from,” she continued. That piece probably wasn’t known to most of the people in this room, and she couldn’t clarify beyond that. She knew that a good chunk of the Gold Dragon tech was based on Precursor systems.
That, however, wasn’t even classified Gold Dragon. Classifying it would require the Imperium to admit that piece of information existed.
“For various reasons, including—as we learned at Centauri—the search for Precursor artifacts and the enforcement of the Kovius Treaty Zones, the Mesharom maintain Frontier Fleet forces throughout the galactic arms. These are usually between two to six Mesharom battlecruisers.”
She flipped the specifications they had on the latest-generation Mesharom ships onto the holographic display.
“While the other Core Powers often go in for much larger ships, a Mesharom battlecruiser remains, ton for ton, the most powerful warship in the known galaxy. They do not ask for help. They do not, generally, need it.
“But they sent a distress signal to Asimov. They specifically requested A!Tol assistance. I…don’t know if even Bellerophon is a useful reinforcement to a Mesharom squadron, but they asked for our help.”
“Much of the Imperium’s survival and strength has been built upon our relationship with the Mesharom,” Vong reminded them all. “We have reason to believe that the Mesharom are responsible for several of the interventions that staved off the Kanzi invasion of Sol seventeen years ago, and they helped defuse the Alpha Centauri incident.
“We owe them. As Lieutenant Commander Casimir notes, Bellerophon isn’t a match for a Mesharom battlecruiser—but she’s closer than anything else in the A!Tol Imperium. Therefore, I’m returning command of Rimward Station to Captain Tongue and taking Bellerophon to the coordinates provided.”
He smiled grimly.
“I expect, Lieutenant Commander Casimir, that you will be pressed into service as our de facto expert again at that point,” he warned her. “So, I’m going to make your life suck. Everyone: please consult with Commander Casimir for any information you believe you will need on the Mesharom. Sorry, Lieutenant Commander, we’re not cutting the rest of your duties.”
She hadn’t expected anything else and nodded calmly.
“I live to serve, sir.”
She couldn’t give another answer, after all.
Morgan had barely made it to her office when Victoria Antonova followed her in, the willowy blonde communications officer smiling apologetically as she did so.
“You’ve actually met a Mesharom?” she asked as the two young women took seats. “That’s…well, that’s freaking cool.”
Morgan laughed. Victoria Antonova, like her, was part of the new generation of officers who’d grown to adulthood in the Duchy with a full knowledge of the galactic scene. She was two years older than Morgan herself and was another rising star of the Militia, from what Morgan could tell.
“You wouldn’t say that if you’d done it,” Morgan told her with a chuckle. “How do you feel about millipedes?”
The communications officer shivered and Morgan chuckled again.
“Me too,” she confirmed. “Now imagine a three-meter long hybrid of a millipede and a fuzzy caterpillar. That’s a Mesharom. They’re big, they’re fuzzy, and they have enough legs and arms to start a shoe store.”
Antonova chuckled herself.
“I’ve seen pictures. They’re intimidating, but…I’m told they’re occasionally difficult to communicate with? I’m going to be responsible for talking to them when we get to the rendezvous, so I’m hoping you can help me out.”
Morgan nodded. A ship’s communications officer was often the most junior of her senior officers, which meant that while Antonova only had a year’s seniority on Morgan, she was in all of the meetings like the one Morgan had just been dragged into.
“You won’t be talking to them,” she told the other woman. “That’s the biggest thing to realize. At no point will you be directly communicating with a Mesharom. Everything will go through an interpreter AI, and their coms to us will be short, potentially rude by our standards. They don’t like people.”
“I keep hearing that about them, but I’m never quite sure what that means,” Antonova admitted.
Morgan considered how best to phrase it.
“At their default state, a Mesharom communicates with other Mesharom in short sentences, preferably shouted from a distance,” she explained. “Electronic communications were the best invention ever, and their civilization survived by passing notes for millennia.
“Mating, children, all of this is very formalized and organized because they don’t like being around each other. Take your worst moment of stage fright ever, layer in that you were actually going to have to do it naked, and then multiply by ten.” Morgan shook her head. “That’s about their baseline.”
Antonova looked perplexed.
“Always?” she asked.
“Always,” Morgan confirmed. “Now, you’re never going to deal with a normal Mesharom. Any of them aboard their ships can at least stand other Mesharom for extended periods, but they also use a lot of robots to make up for how few of them can be on a ship.”
“So, we can talk to the shipboard ones?”
Morgan chuckled and sighed.
“No. Even the ones that make up their starship crews can’t really deal with aliens. In desperation, they can, but they usually have an ‘Interpreter’ aboard. An interpreter is, by Mesharom standards, extraordinarily brave. By our standards, they’re shy and often abrupt.
“But the Interpreters can talk to aliens, so they do. One alien at a time, please and thank you, and only in person, but they’re the key to Mesharom interactions with the rest of the galaxy.”
“So, we talk to machines mostly, and then we may talk to a specially trained ambassador type?”
“Exactly. The Interpreters are entirely reasonable to deal with in my experience, but I’ve only ever met two,” Morgan admitted. “I don’t feel qualified to be an expert.”
“That’s two more than the rest of the ship combined,” Antonova pointed out. “But…” She glanced around, as if making sure they were alone in Morgan’s office. “Can we really help them? They’re the Mesharom.”
“We’re supposed to conceal a lot of our capabilities from them.” Morgan shook her head. “If we stick to protocol, we might not. If we go all-out, though…Bellerophon is one of the few ships in the galaxy that might qualify as being in the same weight class as a Mesharom battlecruiser.”
“That makes no sense,” the other officer said.
“There are reasons. Even I only know some of them. I leave that kind of shit to my parents.”
“Most people would if they had your parents,” the other woman agreed. “Hell, I’d leave that kind of thing to your parents too.�
�
They laughed together, sharing a grin.
“It’s a good thing they’re the ones who have to deal with it, then, isn’t it?”
Chapter Nine
Somehow, emerging from hyperspace into the empty space between the stars was different from jumping into a regular star system. There was a chilly silence on Bellerophon’s bridge as she emerged at the coordinates the Mesharom had given them.
“What have we got?” Vong asked into the quiet as Morgan and Masters ran through the sensor data.
“We’re nine light-years from Asimov, just over four light-years from the nearest star system,” Masters said aloud. “I’m…not detecting much of anything out here, sir.”
“The Mesharom wouldn’t have called us out here as a prank,” Vong pointed out. “I guess they could be hiding under stealth fields?”
“Or damaged or otherwise not emitting an energy signature,” Masters replied grimly. “What I can tell you for certain is that there’s no active ships out here.”
Morgan was already tasking active sensors to pulse specific zones and laying in patterns for drones. She flipped the pattern to Masters for approval. The Commander glanced over the screen, poking at a few sections of the plan, then hit Activate.
At ten point five million tons, Bellerophon’s immense mass didn’t even tremble as two dozen drones fired from her missile tubes. They flashed away from the battleship at sixty percent of the speed of light, hyperfold communicators sending their data back to the mothership near-instantaneously.
“Any communications, Commander Antonova?” Vong asked.
“Negative, sir.” The blonde Russian shook her head. “Com channels are dead. No radio, no hyperfold except our drones. From the amount of chatter out here, we might have dropped out into a completely random patch of nowhere.”
Darkness Beyond (Light of Terra: a Duchy of Terra series Book 1) Page 5
