by Kyle Larson
Corporal Woad had become accustomed to these frequent calls. Aren was a demanding commander and expected her to be working, almost all hours of the day. She barely slept, so her crew barely slept. They felt it gave them an edge when all it really did was make them more mindless and easier not to care about the terrible things they’d done. Woad missed sleep but knew he’d get plenty if he did his job.
“We still need more time. The project is going to be much bigger than my estimate yesterday. We may need to dock with another ship to give us more space,” Woad said.
“Have you lost your mind?” Aren said, sharply. “Out of the question. We’ll carve out some more decks for you, but you figure out how to build it here. I can’t guarantee those ships are on radio silence, and if the Colonel finds out…” She stopped herself. Aren considered the lack of sleep was getting to her, as she’d never usually spoken about the project or trying to keep reports from the Colonel.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Woad said. “I’ll see what we can do. Generating the power isn’t the issue. We have the firepower. It’s building a cannon that can handle that power and making sure it’s not too powerful.”
“And what’s the problem with it being too powerful?”
“Ma’am, it…could electrify the planet and fry everything living down there. Venus’ gravity would act as a lightning rod. The planet would be forever scorched.”
Aren’s face dropped in worry. She was going to be responsible for a very deadly weapon. The weapon she was building hadn’t existed since before the Nine Kingdoms. It was a war relic of a more savage chapter in human history. No one else in the Nine Kingdoms had a design like it.
The Wanderers would be unleashing a nightmare on the Nine Kingdoms, but Aren saw it as her only way to take control of a group dangerously close to becoming radicalized. In building the weapon, Aren made it her number one priority to keep it out of the Colonel’s hands. If he got it, there’s no guess as to how much damage he could do. Aren intended only to use it to bring down the Gravity Shield, then the Colonel –– but nothing more.
“Keep working on it. I want results. Earth Navy has picked up speed. The Monarch and the Colonel’s ships are almost in proximity.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Woad said. The connection was severed.
Aren went back to her view of the electro-blasts that bounced off the gravity shield and out into space. In a way, she expected them to fire back, but the Gravity Warriors could sit and wait for the Uranian Corsairs to show up and do their fighting for them. Aren guessed that once the fleet from Uranus made it to Venus, which was days away, the Gravity Warriors would join the fight. They had no reason to do anything else other than wait. It didn’t bother Aren, they had plenty of time to build the weapon and allow her forces to move in. By the time the Uranian Corsairs arrived, it would be too late.. And of course, if she needed to, the weapon they built could be used to disable the Uranian ships, and then turned on the Colonel’s ships. It would be a glorious moment for Aren, and then she could begin her true work.
“Order all ships to stop their fire. Keep us on battle alert and deploy the fleet in a blockade formation. Nothing gets off Venus. Maintain radio silence, except at hourly check-ins,” Aren said, not bothering to turn around and face the crew she gave the orders to.
The crew was afraid of her now, but she knew one day that fear would evaporate and be replaced with respect. When they saw her plan, they would think of her as a leader, not just a commander giving them harsh orders.
The push and pull between emotion and logic were a constant in Aren’s head. She kept going back to the day she’d decided to embrace the way of the Wanderers. Aren remembered feeling strength for the first time, even though it had always been there. Riz was her first teacher and she was a much stronger student than he expected. Aren rose through the ranks quickly and established herself as a leader among the Wanderers. As a part of the monarchy in the Nine Kingdoms, Aren had seen exactly why that kind of governing was a problem. By giving up her claim to the throne of Earth, Aren demonstrated that she was committed to the cause from the sacrifice. No Wanderer questioned her loyalty when they knew what kind of life she’d given up.
Aren saw the Royal Council use her father as a signature to sign whatever laws they wanted that would only make their families and friends wealthier. She saw corruption, but her mother and father just seemed to accept it as part of the way of things. Aren felt she would be expected to be complicit in the corruption, and she knew it all lead to Jupiter.
Jupiter was what drove the Wanderers. It was where every path they took would lead. Aren saw Jupiter get its influence over members of her father’s Royal Council and she could only imagine what went on in other councils around the Nine Kingdoms. Her parents were able to control what they gave into, but it was enough for Aren to see that there were only a few in the Nine Kingdoms with real power. The Wanderers truly believed Jupiter was building itself up and would take down the Nine Kingdoms, with itself as ruler.
Aren perceived the people of the Nine Kingdoms to be oppressed. If they could see their leaders could be beaten, it would give them the strength to retake the solar system. There would be no more borders and humanity would celebrate one solar system. Despite their differences, Aren knew Riz shared that same vision. She knew they weren’t allied as she approached Venus, but that they would be when this was all over. People like the Colonel and Harcrow were just using the Wanderers. They were no different than those in control of the Nine Kingdoms, and that’s why Aren would let them serve their purpose with their weapons, but would ultimately stop them. She knew her plan was precarious, but there was no doubt in her mind she could pull it off.
Soon Venus would fall and their people would join her. It would be glorious.
The Monarch dodged another spread of electro blasts, just like it had been doing for two days at that point. The Colonel’s ships had a lot of firepower, but they were nowhere near as fast as the Monarch. They could keep up a pursuit, but they had a hard time getting within firing range of the ship itself. It wasn’t an easy task to evade fifteen ships, all of them firing everything they had. Captain Ali counted them lucky that they’d been able to keep it up for so long. She knew it was a matter of time before their luck ran out, so she’d come up with a plan.
They had squads of star divers, smaller single-pilot ships that could swarm a couple of the Colonel’s ships, but Captain Ali didn’t want to use them yet. Launching the star divers would put a lot of the pilots at risk of either being captured or killed, but Holloway had come up with a different plan, which was to confuse them.
Captain Ali was at the end of her thirteen-hour shift. She broke her own rules about getting enough rest to stay sharp in battle. The captain was running on black coffee and adrenaline, both of which were about to fail her. Before she started her shift, she’d only had one hour of sleep. None of the crew were as rested as she hoped, but the captain was especially worse off. She knew she had to leave the bridge and try to rest, but she couldn’t.
The shouting had stopped hours ago. At first, the chaos of battle consumed the bridge for two days. All of the training they had done paid off to a point, but the temper and nerves got the best of everyone. They hadn’t practiced how to keep their voices calm, which Captain Ali realized would have been helpful. Aside from the fifteen-ships that fired at them, the raised voices of panic were equally stressful. Now, everyone just held on like they were stuck on a bad carnival ride, hoping it would end soon. Captain Ali ran her hand through her hair and took another sip of coffee, with the same hope that this would all end and she could just get her people to safety.
“Holloway,” Ali said. “How’s it coming?”
“Almost there, captain,” Holloway’s voice answered in Captain Ali’s headset. She was on the other side of the bridge and Ali didn’t feel like getting up to walk to her. Besides, it was distracting to the rest of the crew when she left her station, as she knew they all anticipated and hoped she would go to her
quarters and rest. Holloway turned from her workstation and flashed a quick thumbs-up to Ali.
“I really hope this works,” Ali said, not really sure if it was to herself or to Holloway.
“Well, with all due respect, ma’am, I really wish you’d go get some rest. You’re destroying any sort of sleep cycle you practiced. When you crash, you’re going to be out for more than three hours. Your body’s going to give up on you,” Holloway said.
Captain Ali knew she was right. The tension between them after the meeting with Queen Eleyn had gone away. There wasn’t time for either of them to hold on to resentment. They needed to work as a team, so they put the misunderstanding behind them. The relationship had improved since the captain had come down hard on Holloway. Holloway recognized that it was an overall frustration with the crew and the captain’s superior officer that prompted her to lash out. Also, there wasn’t anything irrational in what Captain Ali scolded her for. Holloway had stepped out of line and didn’t respect her captain’s authority. She resolved to do better, and Captain Ali could see she was trying.
“You’ve been up longer than I have,” Captain Ali said.
“That’s because you need me to be and I’m in front of a computer. If I’m in front of a computer, mining data and trying to break into an encrypted communications system from a hostile enemy, sleep’s not necessary,” Holloway said. “I have one job. You have everyone’s job.”
Captain Ali smiled to herself at Holloway’s obvious point. Her workstation had a monitor for every system on the ship. Ali continued to nervously glance at the engine status and structural integrity. Her engineers and technicians guaranteed the Monarch could outmaneuver those ships for a hundred years if they needed to. Still, Captain Ali was nervous their power cells would eventually be exhausted. It was hard for her to not be skeptical of the bold technical prediction.
“That’s a good point,” Ali said. “Once I get word that you’ve broken the encryption in their transmissions and can start your plan, then I’ll be able to rest.”
There wasn’t much use in arguing with the captain. Holloway didn’t have the time to advise her commander. The encryption around the Wanderer vessels transmissions was incredibly complex. It took all of Holloway’s skills to get through it. In space, all transmissions between ships were encrypted, end-to-end so no other ships could monitor them. Some encryptions were stronger than others, and some could be broken easily. Jupiter and Neptune were known to have nearly impossible encryptions, while the rest of the Nine Kingdoms struggled to stay secure. Holloway was the only cryptographer to ever break the Jovian and Neptune encryptions.
The encryption done by the Wanderers was something else entirely, though. It was completely foreign to her, the same as the drive she’d hacked from Riz when the Monarch searched for a way out of the Antioch Belt.
Holloway was confident she could decrypt it, but it was going to take time. She was already using most of the computing power from the Monarch, and several of the other calculations she was simultaneously doing in her head. Any concern for the captain’s exhaustion went away as she dove deeper.
Unexpectedly, Holloway finally cracked it and she was patched into the Wanderers communications network. Transmissions, notes, emails –– she had access to all of it. Holloway scrolled through the systems and began downloading everything she could onto the Monarch’s data archive.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Holloway said. “I’ve got it!”
Captain Ali jumped from her chair and ran across the bridge to Holloway’s workstation. She took a seat next to Holloway and glared intently at the monitors displaying everything there was to know about the Wanderers. The hacking had been a huge success, but what Captain Ali and Holloway saw terrified them.
“Oh no,” Ali said. “They have hundreds of ships.”
There were manifests of squads all over the Antioch Belt, just waiting to launch. Holloway could see which ships had just come online and which were still being repaired or built. Once they were operational it would be trouble for Earth Navy and any other fleet that tried to take on the Wanderers without alliances. Ali never doubted Kelvin when he said it would be necessary for the Nine Kingdoms to work together, but this made it much more real.
“Download as much as you can and transmit it to Earth Navy Intelligence,” Ali said, as she turned and walked back to the captain’s workstation.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Holloway tried to ignore the fear that built up as she got a clear look at the Wanderers records. She focused on what she was here to do, which was snatch the identification number from one of the ships over Venus and use it to mask the Monarch communications channel. That way, Holloway could make contact with the Colonel and pretend to be one of the Wanderers. She also had to find an officer name she could pose as.
As Holloway search, the firefight outside the Monarch continued. The electro blasts had come close, but the Monarch remained untouched. Every pilot that rotated in and out of the flight control station knew the Wanderers were just trying to wear them down. Sooner or later, someone would make a mistake. They couldn’t let their digital assistants or guidance computer take the helm, as they risked getting hit if the program were to malfunction. The Monarch relied on the human skills of their pilots.
Holloway found the identification profile of an officer aboard the Empress named June Nayda, who was also the same age. The officer held the rank of lieutenant, but her position was in the engineering section of the ship, and among many other technicians. It was likely that no one of that rank would be of any notice to the Colonel. She also worked on sensor operations, which would help the story Holloway would tell the Colonel.
She also found a ship identification number. It was a ship called the Veni Drifter. Again, Holloway counted on the Colonel not knowing who June Nayda was, but she thought the risk was low. She patched into Captain Ali’s headset. “I’m ready, ma’am. Permission to make contact with the Colonel.”
The communications network of the Monarch became masked and Holloway dispatched the communications request to the Colonel’s personal channel. With any luck, it would go right to his mobile or office. Holloway listened in anticipation, and after a few moments, the sickly voice she recognized echoed from the other end.
“This is the Colonel, and you better have an explanation for contacting me through this channel, Lieutenant Nayda!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CAPITAL CITY of Venus was called Judur and its citizens went about their lives as if it were any other day. They were well aware there was a fleet of hostile ships in orbit that were firing everything they had at them. The people of Judur weren’t at all worried, though. They knew who protected them. They knew who the Gravity Warriors were.
The Royal Palace was far from the capital city, mostly because it was where many of the elder Gravity Warriors lived, and they enjoyed the quiet of nature. That didn’t keep them all from rushing to Judur to make sure the people of Venus knew that the Gravity Warriors were prepared to defend it. Queen Tendai and King Etho would remain in Judur until the Wanderers had been dealt with, while the Gravity Warriors would be dispatched all over Venus.
The planet was not heavily populated, so the Gravity Warriors knew exactly where they needed to be. Tendai and Etho looked out from the Archive that stood at the center of Judur. It was the tallest structure in the vast city of extremely tall structures. Life in Judur was bustling and it was one of the most well-regarded cities in the Nine Kingdoms.
“I knew this day would come, my love,” Etho said, as he took his eyes of the city and turned them toward Tendai. She would never admit it, but her partner could tell she was worried. They had both seen war and their worst nightmare was that they would have to experience it again.
“I’ve accepted it, Etho. This is no worse than Karna,” Tendai said. She felt the weight of the name as soon as it left her mouth –– the name of her son.
Etho had not heard Tendai speak of their son in decad
es. He’d been dead for over a century, but his memory still haunted them. Karna was their first child and they blamed themselves for what happened to him. They were so focused on building Venus up at the time they didn’t notice what Karna had turned into. Karna had always been strong, but one day, he believed himself strong enough to challenge his parents for the rule of Venus.
At that time, Tendai and Etho were very much in charge of what happened on Venus, though they did rule democratically. The Gravity Warriors were involved in every aspect of Venusian life. When Karna challenged their authority, Tendai and Etho held an election and agreed to give up their authority if the people of Venus voted for Karna. Karna wanted to attack Saturn and conquer them in revenge for what had been done to Venus. He was twenty-seven, with Teve only three years younger. Tendai and Etho, as well as the rest of the Gravity Warriors, were opposed to any kind of attack. They were not interested in making the relations between Saturn and their planet anymore hostile they already were.
All of the painful memories came back to Etho when Tendai spoke their son’s name.
Karna lost the election, as the vast majority of Venus voted for Tendai and Etho. Those who supported Karna joined him and they went into hiding. After a few days, they started attacking cities around Venus. Tendai, Etho, and Teve went looking for Karna, who was as skilled a Gravity Warrior as all of them. Teve was the only one to find him, and the brother’s dueled. Their fight lasted for hours, but Teve beat his brother. Rather than surrender, Karna detonated an explosive device, trying to kill his brother, but ended up killing himself.
Karna and his followers left many cities of Venus destroyed. It was the only time war had occurred on their planet because of their own people. All of the Venusians vowed never to let it happen again. As terrible as it was, Venus came out of it stronger, but the pain of losing Karna never went away for the Dubak family.
