The Terran Gambit

by Nick Webb

  Titus tried to breathe, but couldn’t take his eyes from the crumpled corpse on the deck, and the red pool that now stretched from its broken head. He’d seen death before—too much of it. No Corsican fleet captain goes through a life of military service without seeing it everywhere. But it was always from a distance, and it was usually the enemy’s, or his own men whom he had ordered, always reluctantly, into battle for a greater cause.

  Never like this.

  This was senseless.

  “Better, Captain?” The Admiral still stood next to him, arms at his side. Slowly, reluctantly, Titus nodded, and got to his feet, breathing deep, silent breaths. “Good. I will clean up here a bit while you go compose yourself. You look horrible.” He walked back to his desk and opened a drawer, making Titus startle, his heart nearly jumping into his throat. The Admiral extracted several rags, and closed the drawer. He began wiping the desk.

  Titus needed to leave, and marched towards the door before he became sick.

  “Oh, and Captain?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  Trajan picked up the framed certificate he had given Lombardi and tucked it back into the drawer. “When you get a chance, send in the two technicians. Rossi and Chang. I need to thank them as well.”

  He’s a madman.

  Dear lord. What have we done?

  CHAPTER SIX

  LIEUTENANT COMMANDER JACOB MERCER’S BRIDGE rotation began rather uneventfully: he was assigned to merely check over the crew rotations Ben Jemez had scheduled and figure out how to insert the names of another few dozen people who arrived on the last passenger carrier that morning. The old, cranky XO would occasionally come peer over his shoulder to check on his progress before grumbling something about careless officers who couldn’t pay attention to detail and wandered off to prowl around some of the other stations, to the chagrin of the bridge officers.

  Jake glanced around at them all—the blonde haired, blue eyed young navigator, Ensign Tate, and his short, even younger pilot, Ensign Roshenko—a woman who didn’t look to be over twenty. Was the academy lowering the age requirements? He took it as a sign of the gamble the Resistance High Council was taking on this incredibly risky operation. Nine Freedom-class heavy cruisers, all to be launched at once, with some of the most important officers in the Imperial High Command looking on from their ship. The hope was the Resistance could not only take the Nine, but also wipe out a generous helping of the Imperial warships in attendance at the ship launch. Far more economical that way.

  His gaze continued around the bridge. At tactical stood another woman, older and more experienced-looking than Ensign Roshenko. Lieutenant Pierce, he believed. She had an entire section of tactical staff under her, huddled around an octagonal workstation, which made for easy coordination with each other. Staffed almost entirely by men, with one noteworthy exception, the octagon handled everything from weapons targeting to tactical sensors to coordinating communications and tactics between different departments on the ship, including the railgun turrets, the ion beam cannons, the defensive screen gunners, and the fighter squadron.

  The exception to the all-male tactics department, in addition to their commander Lieutenant Pierce, was a woman unlike any he’d ever seen. Bleached-white short hair, colorful tattoos covering her arms, neck, and part of her face, about fifteen piercings per ear, several more spanning her eyebrows, and if he had to guess, the tongue as well. A single medallion on a rough string dangled around her neck.

  And then Jake placed her. He’d only seen one or two others like her during his time in the Resistance fleet, and had never had the chance to talk to them. A Belenite. He walked over to the tactical station and stood over her.

  “Hi. Lieutenant Commander Mercer. I’m afraid we haven’t met.”

  She glanced up, a distant smile blooming over her face. Jake could see the tattoos more clearly now, confirming his suspicion. Not just any old tattoos, these depicted a verdant forest setting, the tops of trees flowing up onto her cheeks, the trunks splayed out on her neck and disappearing beneath her uniform, only to continue on as leafy branches onto her arms. “Ensign Ayala, sir. A blessing to meet you.” She took his hand and shook it.

  “You’re not from Earth, I presume?”

  “Does it show?” Her distant, almost mystical smile deepened, revealing her ivory-white teeth.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound rude. It’s just that I’ve never met someone from Belen before. I mean,” he stuttered, trying to choose his words more carefully. “I mean, you’re not from Belen, not in technical terms, of course.”

  A pained look shadowed her face. “Commander, the Imperial propaganda machine would have you believe that one can not be from a world that does not exist. But the survivors of Belen, my people, we are Belen. You see it in our faces. You see it in our skin. The forests and the soul of Belen lives on in us.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. I mean, my planet came this close to suffering Belen’s fate, so, I feel … honored to have you on board. Did you come far to be here?”

  She nodded. “Yes. As you know, when the Empire destroyed our world, we fled to the stars, living a nomadic life in the heavens where the Empire could neither hurt nor make afraid. My home ship is the Greenwood, currently in orbit around … well, I’d rather not say. I hope you understand, Commander.”

  He shook his head and briefly touched her shoulder, in a sign of camaraderie. “Say no more. I understand.” He supposed the survivors of Belen had learned to always hold information as close to the chest as possible. Even though the senate had chastised the over-zealous emperor who had given the fatal order, when one’s homeworld is destroyed, trust does not just come overnight, even though the Empire had pledged to find them a suitable replacement world and promised huge sums of money to build it up to the Belenites’ liking. They refused, of course, not willing to betray those who sacrificed themselves defending their world and buying time for the others to escape.

  She flashed the same mystical smile at him before glancing back down to her console. Something there made her smile disappear, replaced by a furrowed brow, which made the eyebrow rings bunch up and protrude slightly from her forehead. “Sir, I’m getting an anomalous sensor reading from the sun. It’s …” she studied the board, flicking her fingers lightly across the surface.

  “What is it? A solar flare? A ship?”

  “I don’t know. It’s gone. It was like something was there, something large, but … hmm,” she pushed a few more sensor adjustment buttons on the screen, then shook her head. “Sorry, sir, probably just a ghost reading. I’ve been getting them off and on throughout the day. In fact, I think navigation has been having problems with their controls too.”

  He nodded. “It’s a new ship. There’s bound to be some bugs. I’ll call engineering to see what they can do about it.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Nice to meet you, Ensign Ayala.”

  “A blessing to meet you, sir. Peace,” she said, in the customary Belenite manner.

  Peace, he thought. God willing.

  Continuing his stroll, he looked over the rest of the officers at tactical. One glanced up nervously at him, before looking back down to his station. Short—from what he could tell, sensibly-styled brown hair and a somewhat pudgy physique, he seemed focused intently on his console. Jake approached, and stuck out a hand.

  “And how goes it, Ensign? All missiles accounted for?”

  The man’s head shot up, and he smiled a broad, almost unnaturally gregarious smile. “Yes, sir! All torpedo tubes are on standby for nuclear warhead loading, and all quantum field missiles are present and functional. I’ve even got the crews practicing the loading procedure now.”

  An odd man. Over-eager and earnest. Probably just nervous. Jake nodded and waved a hand in a lazy salute. “Excellent work, Ensign …” he paused, not remembering the man’s name.

  “Ensign Smith, sir!”

  “Good work, Smith. As you were.”

  H
e wandered back to his station, nodding a greeting to the other members of the bridge crew as he passed, when the door to the bridge slid open and a middle-aged man walked through. Jake recognized him from years earlier—he was highly placed in the Resistance intelligence services at the time, and Jake was pretty sure the man still served in that capacity, albeit more discretely. Commander Ellison, if he remembered correctly.

  The man strode past him, not looking at or greeting anyone, but rather aimed straight for the corridor that led to the Captain’s ready room, disappearing behind the door at the end.

  Shrugging, he sat down to finish his assignment and soon moved on to analyzing department performance. Muddling through the numbers and statistics, he soon came to the conclusion that being the XO was probably not for him. He was far more comfortable flying hair-raising maneuvers in close quarters than with crunching numbers and making incremental ship process-flow improvements.

  A half-hour later, the intel commander stepped out of the ready room, and passed through the bridge again, nearly running towards the exit, and the elevator beyond. The Captain followed, headed straight for the XO and Jake. “Gentlemen. Senior staff meeting in ten minutes. Comm,” he turned to the heavy-set man in the communications station chair, “tell Po, Jemez, and Commander Xi in engineering to get up here.” He glanced back at the XO. “Might as well invite Doc Nichols, too. He’ll have some insight.”

  Several minutes later, the seven senior staff members assembled in the conference room next to the captain’s ready room, and shut the door.

  “This is Captain Richard Watson, Commanding officer of the NPQR Phoenix,” he said to the ever-listening computer. “Lock the door and disable all comm feeds from this room, authorization code sigma alpha two five nine charley beta. Enter top-secret security mode, level twelve.”

  “Acknowledged. Space is now secured for top-secret security discussions, level twelve,” replied the computer.

  Captain Watson motioned to his officers. “Have a seat,” he said, taking a chair at the head of the table. “I’ve just spoken with Resistance Intel. They’re not sure what to make of it, and frankly, neither am I.” He took a deep breath.

  “Last week, the mining colony of Havoc was attacked, and the assailants stole their entire store of Neodymium. Just a few days later, this same Neodymium showed up at Geneseo Station—I mean, Liberty Station—just in time to get the production timeline back on schedule, to the delight of the Resistance High Council. As it was, the nine Freedom-class cruisers were scheduled to be finished one by one as the Neodymium shipments trickled in, meaning that instead of making one big splash when we took the Nine, we would have to wait until each was completed before making our move, and by then the Nine would be spread out across the empire on assignments. But this shipment ensured that each ship will be finished within a few days of each other, meaning that the launching ceremony will be held at the same time as the D-day commemoration ceremony.”

  “But sir, wasn’t that the original plan the whole time? Make our move during the ceremony?” Ben said.

  “It was, Jemez, but the circumstances surrounding the whole thing seem damn peculiar. I suppose you can’t guess who attacked the Havoc station.”

  They all looked at one another. “Pirates?” Jake offered.

  “The USS Fury, commanded by Captain Pritchard,” said the Captain.

  Impossible. Jake knew the rumors too, the ones that everyone else had heard over the last three years, that Admiral Pritchard had been killed by pirates, or that he’d amassed an entire rebel fleet on the outskirts of the pax humana, or even that he’d found himself a nice young slave girl on Pollax and had settled down on the tropical paradise somewhere. But then he paused—trying to remember something.

  The bar—Liberty’s End, on the station. The giant technician he’d pummeled. The man and his friends had said roughly the same thing about Havoc and the Fury, but Jake had dismissed it as yet another apocryphal Pritchard sighting. More common than a virgin Mary sighting on the planet Curacao, one of the handful of devout Roman Catholic worlds of the empire.

  The XO slammed his fist on the table. “Bullshit. Pritchard would never do that. Not even if it meant the difference between success and failure of this mission. It’s got to be pirates. Or some damn Imperial ship posing as Pritchard.”

  “Exactly,” said the Captain. “That is exactly what intel thinks. As you know—and as far as I know it’s the truth—the Resistance Council has had zero contact with Pritchard since he fled the battle of D-day. For all we know, he’s dead—the Fury was pretty beat up when she made the shift.”

  Po, who had been listening silently the entire time, perked her head up. “Why? Why would the Empire have any interest in ensuring that the Nine are finished all at the same time? I mean, enough to attack Havoc and risk political backlash in the senate? As far as I know, Havoc is part of the pax humana. They’re Imperial, right?”

  Watson nodded. “It’s what we feared when we started planning this whole operation, Commander Po. When we heard what the capabilities of these new ships were, and that they would all be finished at roughly the same time, it seemed too good to be true, and yet it was too inviting of a target to pass up. Just think of it—nine ships with advanced weaponry, propulsion, and defense systems, all in one place, ripe for the taking, and with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission out there ensuring that the former Resistance fighters were integrating back into the Imperial fleet. It seemed fishy all right, but the High Command gave the go-ahead. This most recent development has only confirmed our suspicion that someone highly placed in the Imperial High Command is planning something.”

  “Do you think the Imperial engineers at the Shipyards have sabotaged the ships? Built them shoddily or faulty somehow?” said Commander Xi, the chief engineer.

  “We don’t know that, but we assume no. Besides, most of the staff at the shipyards are former Resistance people. Hell, all the new tech that went into these things were cooked up in labs based in former Resistance territory. The new gravitic drive? CERN—over in Europe. The quantum field disruptor missiles? Los Alamos—down by Albuquerque. Yeah, ever heard of the Bronx Project during the height of the Resistance a few years ago? That was Los Alamos all right, and it resulted in our shiny new missiles. So no, I don’t believe they’ve sabotaged us. But we suspect treachery, nonetheless.”

  Doc Nichols cocked his head. “You mean, they’re responding to our treachery with treachery of their own? Shocking.”

  Captain Watson looked peeved, and shot Nichols a piercing look. “Our actions are not treachery, Tom. We’re fighting a war of liberation here, not—”

  Nichols held up a hand. “Kidding, Dick. Don’t get so excited.”

  Silence hung over the conference table, before the XO stirred. “So what the hell do we do?”

  Captain Watson strummed his fingers on the conference table. “The Resistance Council has decided to continue the operation. But we are to be ready for unexpected challenges. Needless to say, the Empire might be anticipating our move. But the orders are to proceed with caution. Therefore, we haven’t the luxury for spreading you three around like I was planning on. I’m making the final assignments now. Jemez? You’ll be the assistant XO. Po, you’re heading up ops, and Mercer?” he said, glancing up at Jake, “You’re officially our new wing commander. Questions?”

  He glanced around the table at them all. Po raised her hand. “Is there any chance at all that the Empire knows about our new armaments? Their intelligence services are good. Very good. Might they not have infiltrated Los Alamos?”

  “As far as we know, we have that advantage. In fact, our whole strategy depends on them not knowing about our secret weapon. At least, not yet,” said the Captain. Po nodded, and he added, “In time, it will be knowledge of that secret weapon that will encourage the Empire to cut us loose.”

  He stood up. The others followed suit. “The battle plans we agreed to back down on Earth are still the marching orders that all the Nin
e ships will adhere too. But we should make contingency plans all the same, Commanders,” he said, looking at them each in turn. “Present me with some options by the end of the day tomorrow. Dismissed.”

  ***

  The Caligula shifted into existence about a hundred thousand kilometers from the red giant star that the planet Bismark called home, and within the hour, made a second shift to a high orbit around the planet itself. A shimmering blue atmosphere wrapped the planet and green oceans teeming with oxygen-producing cyanobacteria surrounded the plain, drab continents. There were only five of them, each less than the size of Earth’s Australia, Captain Titus noted, and their color indicated the presence of dust and rock and little else, except for the vast fields of green surrounding the cities, betraying the presence of human-controlled irrigation and crops, subduing the harsh realities of life outside the lush, verdant worlds like Earth, Corsica, New Kyoto, and the handful of others. Life was tenuous everywhere else, something you fought for. Something you hunted down with a club.

  “Ensign Evans, relay Admiral Trajan’s message to the Imperial Command Headquarters in New Berlin,” he said, referring to the capital city of the planet below.

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Titus wondered why he had compared the Bismarkian continents to Australia, before he remembered, trying to suppress the pit in his stomach. Petty officer Chang—one of the techs who’d assisted the late chief engineer—his family lived in Australia, and Titus could imagine them getting the news in a few days of their father’s and husband’s ‘unfortunate accident,’ as the official report would read.

  “You’re from Bismark, aren’t you, Evans?”

  “Yes sir. A little town called Rye, an hour or so from New Berlin,” said Ensign Evans. Rye—surely named for the crop they were assigned by the central Bismarkian government to produce.

  “Must be nice coming home then, Ensign.” Titus stared out the viewport ahead, unable to stop thinking about a certain little village in Australia.