Ixan Legacy Box Set

by Scott Bartlett

  “Um…and did it?” That was Husher’s best attempt at pretending he was keeping up.

  “I don’t know. I never figured out a way to fire an atom in infinity different directions simultaneously. Nevertheless, I decided to have a shot at creating a decoherence-free space anyway, within the simulation at least. That didn’t happen either, but it made me think—what if such a space already exists in the universe, but simply isn’t detectable using regular means? Then I started to wonder how it might be accessed. The idea popped into my head that perhaps negative-mass environments, which we know very little about, might hold the key.”

  “Like the ones created inside warp bubbles?”

  “Exactly. But we’ve made use of negative mass before, in wormhole generators. And so, since there are no actual consequences inside a simulation, I decided to attempt something that would almost certainly be illegal under current galactic law.”

  “You opened up a wormhole inside a warp bubble?”

  Ochrim tilted his head sideways. “No. I didn’t bother with warp bubbles. Instead, I generated a new type of wormhole, which encompassed the starship like a sphere.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “The simulation crashed. It couldn’t account for what I was attempting to do.”

  “So…”

  “Captain, if my theory concerning the physics involved is correct, then two things are true. The first is that, in addition to the many-worlds interpretation, membrane or ‘brane’ cosmology also holds true for our particular universe. Basically, the three-dimensional space we live in is just one of many ‘branes’ or ‘dimensions’ that make up our universe and are gravitationally interrelated. The second thing that’s true concerns our use of dark tech. In short, we employed it in completely the wrong way—to connect different parts of three-dimensional space to each other. That’s why the technology was found to have such long-term catastrophic effects; the gravitational load we were placing on our individual brane was too much for it to bear, and if we’d carried on, we would have destroyed it. But I believe that connecting branes is how wormholes are actually meant to be used. That way, the gravitational effects are distributed across branes in a way that is easily borne by the universal substructure.”

  “What benefits are there to connecting the branes?”

  “I’m not sure,” Ochrim admitted. “I’d have to try it to find out. On a much smaller scale, of course—I believe I could do the testing in my lab.”

  “Right. Let me see if I have this straight. You want me to authorize you to use illegal technology so that you can test the benefits of reaching a part of the universe that might not exist and if it does, might not exist in a form that’s of any actual use to us.”

  “Essentially, yes. But it’s not only authorization that I require—I’ll also need Ocharium with which to fabricate the necessary circuitry.”

  “I’m going to have to think about it.”

  Chapter 27

  Thumbs-Down

  It took Maeve Aldaine a few days to make good on her promise to make Husher’s life a living hell, but in the end, she delivered.

  A petition was making the rounds on the Vesta’s narrownet with her name at the top. It called Husher a human supremacist for failing to sign on to the Positive Response Program, and it also demanded that he resign.

  Even though he was technically off-duty, Husher’s spare moments were typically spent in his office anyway, trying to stay on the speeding treadmill that was keeping his ship running. He hated to take time away from that to put out this fire, but Aldaine’s petition was already approaching three thousand signatures—six percent of Cybele’s population.

  Cybele was in many ways a university town, and so those numbers shouldn’t have surprised him as much as they did. But besides the threat the petition posed, the fact that so many had signed it also kind of stung. He’d always tried his best to be a good captain and a responsible steward of what the capital starship had become, as much as he objected to that transformation. But according to this petition, at least, he’d failed.

  Husher decided the best way to defend himself was to tell the truth about his feelings on this issue—to present his argument with as much logic and sincerity as he could muster. He slid a datapad closer for easy access, willed his Oculenses to bring up the official social aggregator for the Vesta’s crew, and he began typing.

  “I believe the hyper-focus on group identity,” he wrote, “while well-intentioned, is misguided. I believe it’s fragmenting our society even as it’s meant to bring us together. The Interstellar Union was built on the idea that the most important thing about a being isn’t the species or group they belong to, but the content of their character. No one’s species should define them, but initiatives such as the Positive Response Program seek to do exactly that. That makes the program divisive. Do we have problems associated with interspecies relations in our society? Yes. Deep-seated problems. But forcing group identity to the forefront of our discourse does nothing to address them. On the contrary, I firmly believe it makes them worse.”

  Satisfied with what he’d written, he pushed it out to the various social channels where the crew maintained a presence. Then he returned to using his Oculenses to work through an endless stack of performance reviews, making a note to confer a promotion wherever he thought one was warranted.

  A few hours later, he picked a social channel at random and signed on to check how his post was being received. His eyes widened.

  There were almost a hundred comments, almost all negative, and a number of thumbs-down reactions that far outweighed the number of thumbs-ups. Dozens of users had also rebroadcast the post, and Husher saw that very few of them had added positive commentary.

  When he checked Aldaine’s petition, he saw it had jumped to over five thousand signatures. Over ten percent of Cybele…

  He slumped back in his chair, but the Oculenses made sure his view of the narrownet turmoil followed his vision, and he continued to scroll through pages and pages of outrage.

  “By suggesting that nonhuman beings shouldn’t value their species identity,” said one post that was typical of most of them, “the captain is denying their experiences. Take Wingers. They were slaughtered by the thousands, probably millions, at human hands. Even now, they suffer from institutional biases against them that seem designed to make sure they never do as well as humans. The captain’s advice to ‘forget your species identity’ is a cynical attempt to get beings to stop fighting for their rights, and I find it absolutely disgusting. This captain is a white human supremacist.”

  Husher laughed at that, more from disbelief than from amusement. The narrownet activists, who seemed to outnumber the ones he’d encountered in the streets of Cybele by orders of magnitude, had expanded their demands since Husher had made his post. They were now demanding that he and his human crew join their fellow humans in Cybele by participating in a Nonattendance Day for humans, to show solidarity with their nonhuman brothers and sisters. On that day, humans would be asked not to go out in public.

  A chime rang in the office, indicating someone at the hatch, and Husher willed his Oculenses to go transparent. The narrownet tumult vanished from view, though it seemed to linger in the air around him like an oppressive fog.

  He opened the hatch to find Fesky on the other side. “Need a drink?” she asked.

  “Kaboh has the command?”

  “Yep.”

  “All right, then.”

  They went to the Providence Lounge, which was the crew’s lounge, named for the supercarrier that had led the fight against the Ixa during the Second Galactic War. Husher found the name a bit ironic, since he knew for a fact that Captain Keyes would never have permitted a place on his ship where crewmembers were officially sanctioned to drink alcohol. But with Cybele right next door, it was inevitable that the crew would go drinking while off-duty. Better to give them a place of their own, where they didn’t have to worry about civilian scrutiny—and where any trouble
they caused was limited to the crew section.

  Crewmembers still went to Cybele bars for variety, of course, and no small amount of trouble had been caused over the years. He never saw too many service members in a place like the Secured Zone, though, despite the militarized name.

  When you entered the Providence Lounge, you saw the bar right away—a long counter that ran along the opposite wall. You could sit there and chat with your neighbors and the bartender, or you could join in at one of the tables, which tended to alternate between card games and lively conversation.

  “I’ll buy,” Fesky said.

  “Thanks,” Husher said, settling into a chair, his gaze drifting to a Poker game being played at a table nearby. “Time to ante up, everybody,” a marine private was saying. “You can’t win if you don’t have some skin in the game.”

  A couple minutes later, Fesky returned with a lager for him and a bottle for herself. Wingers had trouble drinking from glasses, and her beverage contained no alcohol, since the substance did nothing for Winger physiology.

  “It’s pretty rich they’re calling me a white human supremacist, now,” Husher said. “I don’t suppose it counts for anything that my greatest hero was Captain Keyes, a black man.”

  “Of course not,” Fesky said, taking a sip. “You’ve been deemed unrighteous, and by definition it’s impossible for you to ever do anything good.”

  “At least we’ll arrive in Saffron soon, and I’ll be confronted with actual military matters to take my mind off all this.”

  Fesky lowered her bottle to the table. “Hopefully the ‘actual military matters’ don’t happen in the Viburnum System instead, to the munitions facility.”

  Grimacing, Husher said, “I’d assumed you brought me here to cheer me up.”

  “Captain,” Fesky said. “Speaking as a Winger and as your friend—I have to advise against signing onto the Positive Response Program. Even if it worked like it’s supposed to, which it doesn’t, it would still weaken the bonds of your crew even more than they’ve already been weakened. Crew solidarity isn’t something we should be taking for granted, especially during a time of war. Now is not the time to implement a program like this.”

  “I’m well aware of that, Fesky.”

  “Are you?” his friend said, and a tense quiet came between them.

  Eventually, Husher drained the rest of his drink and placed the empty glass on the table. “Thanks,” he said, and left the lounge.

  After that, he and Fesky mostly avoided each other for the rest of the warp transition, which their conflicting CIC watches made pretty easy. For his part, Husher didn’t know what to say to Fesky. He didn’t know what to say to anyone, these days, not even to himself. The pressures bearing down on him were pushing him in two very different directions—military effectiveness and social acceptability—and he felt like he was failing at both.

  Awkwardness aside, when he received the notification that they were about to transition into the Saffron System, he called his entire first watch to the CIC, including Fesky.

  There was no way he’d enter a potential engagement situation without her at his side.

  Chapter 28

  A Ship That Size

  Just as starships were forced to use warp departure points that were well outside star systems, they also had to transition back into realspace well outside their destinations. That had as much to do with the threat of debris as it did with the risk of destroying whatever was directly in front of the ship as it exited the warp bubble. Doing so released every particle the bubble had collected during transit simultaneously, in a massive shockwave with the power to obliterate space stations and starships alike, no matter the size.

  Some systems simply weren’t accessible via warp drive. The Sol System represented one such—the spherical Oort Cloud meant that transitioning outside it placed a ship a light year or more from meaningful in-system destinations. Luckily, it still had a functioning darkgate. Even though the Ixa had decimated Sol’s population, Husher was glad access to humanity’s home system was still possible, if only for sentimental reasons. Shortly after the Second Galactic War, the IU had begun a terraforming project aimed at rehabilitating Earth, but that would take centuries to come to fruition.

  “I just received radar confirmation of the safe arrival of the Thero, the Golgos, the Hylas, and the Lysander, Captain,” said the sensor operator once they’d successfully completed their transition into realspace. “They’re forming up a few light minutes ahead of us.”

  “Acknowledged. Coms, transmit orders for them to continue accelerating in formation toward the system’s largest colony. We’ll meet them there. How does Saffron look, Winterton?”

  “It looks quiet, sir,” the sensor operator answered, and Husher resisted the urge to check what Kaboh’s reaction to that news would be. “That said, the sensor data we currently have access to is two hours out of date.”

  “Thank goodness the system wasn’t attacked as of two hours ago,” Kaboh said. “But we must remain vigilant nevertheless. Our presence could end up meaning everything to the people of Saffron.”

  “Kindly limit commentary to our immediate tactical situation,” Husher snapped, irritated by what sounded suspiciously like political posturing, at least to his ears.

  “Yes, sir,” Kaboh said crisply.

  “Coms, have Commander Ayam stand by to scramble Pythons, just in case.” Husher knew that order lent Kaboh’s words more weight, but he wasn’t about to start putting his personal pride above tactics.

  “Yes, sir,” Fry said.

  The quiet persisted as the Vesta rode Saffron’s gravity well down-system. As they neared the biggest colony, whose orbit happened to place it closest to the warp transition point the supercarrier had entered through, a transmission came through from the Selene’s captain. The frigate was too far off for real-time communications, but Husher had Fry play the audio and video for his CIC crew to hear.

  “Captain Husher,” said Ternon, who was Tumbran—a rarity among IGF warship captains. “Thank you to you and your battle group for coming so quickly. We’ve yet to detect any hostile vessels in-system, but I find it highly unlikely that readings identical to those taken in the Wintercress System would not precede a similar attack.”

  “Send a text reply asking him to come closer so we can have a real-time chat about how best to array our forces,” Husher told the Coms officer, not in the mood to record the message himself.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Winterton sat straighter in his seat, eyes fixated on whatever he saw on the main display. “Sir, an unknown vessel just appeared less than a light minute off our port bow. Its profile doesn’t match that of the warship we encountered in the Wintercress System. The dark-gray coloration is similar, but its shape is that of an almost featureless oblong spheroid, and it’s massive—she rivals the Vesta in size.”

  Husher toggled to a visualization of the ship generated by radar, since they were too far for actual visual inspection. Good God. That thing’s twice as big as the Providence was.

  “Coms, send a transmission demanding—”

  Winterton interrupted: “Sir, the vessel’s hostile. It just began launching missiles identical to those used against us by Teth’s ship. It…the missile barrage isn’t ending, Captain.”

  “Full reverse thrust, Helm, now!” Husher said. “Coms, have Commander Ayam scramble the entire Air Group and start targeting down those things. Tactical, set lasers to point defense mode, to supplement our kinetic point defense systems. Standby to load Banshees with guidance directives that prioritize targeting the incoming robots.”

  The chief hesitated, glancing at Husher. “Captain?”

  “Just do it, Tremaine,” Husher snapped. He blew air through his nostrils, then tried to soften his tone: “I’m just as reluctant to spend Banshees taking down those things as you are, but I’m even less reluctant to let them rip through my hull and infiltrate my ship.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Coms, tel
l Major Gamble to mobilize his entire marine battalion and get them patrolling the outer corridors in squads. I want two platoons assigned to Cybele and two more divided among the Vesta’s vital systems.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  His first volley of orders delivered, Husher had his Oculenses show him the Tactical display. Over a hundred of the vicious little robots screamed toward his ship, with more being fired from the enemy vessel.

  He scrutinized the display for further action he could take. His battle group had already reached Edessa, and was too far away to lend the Vesta their aid. However…

  “Coms, the Selene is close enough to get here within a timeframe meaningful for this engagement. If they pile on enough speed, they can hit the enemy ship from behind and take some of the pressure off. Send Commander Ternon a transmission requesting he do so.”

  “Composing the request now, sir.”

  The moment the words were out of Fry’s mouth, Winterton’s hands left his console in a gesture of shocked exasperation. “Sir, the enemy warship vanished.”

  Damn it. Husher didn’t know what that meant for them, but he doubted it was good. “I want ongoing active scans of the entire system.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Husher’s eyes settled on Kaboh, who was facing him, wearing a prim smile. “Is there anything I can do, Captain?” he asked, his satisfaction evident.

  Husher had managed to keep his emotions under control as he gave out orders to deal with the immediate threat, but the Kaithian’s smugness helped unleash his temper. “You can reflect on the fact that if a ship that size tried appearing underneath Edessa’s orbital defense platforms, it would doom itself. The planet’s gravity well would drag it from the sky. The system could have defended itself from this attack without our help, Kaboh.”

  Chapter 29

  Blood on Hands

  The tactical display told Husher that when the hostile vessel vanished, it had left two hundred and thirty-nine robots speeding across the void toward the Vesta. The strange ordnance, totally new to Husher’s experience of space warfare, seemed to have guidance systems at least as sophisticated as his Banshees, and so simply steering the supercarrier out of the way wasn’t going to cut it. He had to deal with every last one.