Jack of Harts 2.5: Wolfenheim Rising (10 page)

“Smith.”  He only said the one word, but the man turned to look at him, one foot in the open hatch, and raised one questioning eyebrow.  “If you really want me, I’ll give it a try,” Malcolm said into the silence.

The old man hiding behind the boy’s face aimed a stern gaze at him.  “There is no
try
.” He said in a very hard voice.  “There is only
do
.”  He waved an arm towards the ship around them.  “
Trying
is
dying
.”

Malcolm met the challenge in the man’s gaze and felt it settle into his soul.  The stubborn idiot from the past smiled and accepted it without question.  Malcolm sucked in a long breath, let it out, and nodded.  “Then I guess I’ll
do
,” he answered, and the stubborn, idealistic fool from his past practically bubbled with pride.

The old Marine stared at him for several seconds, measuring him carefully.  Then Smith nodded and the Marine faded away, replaced by a seventeen-year-old kid with a cocky smile.  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” the kid said and stepped out of the day cabin.  Anna took one step into the hatch, paused to aim another examining look at Malcolm, and skipped out after him.  Skipped.  With a dimples, a freckled smile, and everything.

“I like them,” Dawn whispered after the hatch closed behind them, and moved to sit down in the vacated chair again.

“They make me feel old,” Malcolm returned, not wanting to think about the other things they made him feel.  It had been a long time since he met someone that made him want to step up like that.  He ran the fingers of one hand through his hair to cover that realization.

“Well, that’s fair,” Dawn answered with an amused smile and crossed her legs on the shared ottoman between them.  “You
are
old.”

“Hush, you,” Malcolm shot back.

“Baby pictures,” Dawn warned, one raised finger in the air.

Malcolm chuckled and smiled.  She met his gaze and he read the promise in them.  She would help.  No matter what.  “New job?” he whispered, turning the rejoinder into a question.

“Sounds good to me,” she answered with a crooked smile and turned to look out at the multicolored rivers of hyperspaces flowing past them.  “I was getting bored anyways.”

Malcolm examined her profile for a few seconds, and then turned to follow her gaze with a satisfied sigh.  It
was
a beautiful sight.

Malcolm flexed his fingers as hyperspace roiled around the Blackhawk fighter.  In the near distance,
Normandy
flailed through the gravitic maelstrom surrounding the Pleiades Cluster.  He’d heard stories of the Pleiades but assumed they were just that.  Wild stories told to impressionable children.

Seeing it now, he understood why the NASA missions had never even tried to explore the Hyades Cluster.  Her one hundred or so stars tore at hyperspace so badly that old rocket ships could never have navigated it.  But the over one
thousand
stars that made up the Pleiades were a true terror to anything without modern gravtech.  Even modern vessels had to tread carefully and watch for gravitic currents that would pull them into nearby stars without warning.

But the siren call of Celaeno’s effect on hyperspace guided them through the chaos.  The giant star stood out even against the backdrop of the cluster, giving them a target to aim for.  That beacon-star quality was why Constantinople claimed the system decades ago.  They named it Bosphorus, after the waterway that had made Byzantium, Constantinople, and even short-lived Istanbul the center of trade on old Earth.

The name made sense.  The hot giant star, twenty-five lightyears from the center of the Pleiades Cluster, stabbed a path deep into the hyperspatial maelstrom that surrounded the cluster.  Ships sailed that path to the Alcyone star system, deep in the center of the cluster, to find the greatest single reason that anyone ever came to the Pleiades.  The Gateway.

Peloran space lay on the other side of The Gateway, thousands of lightyears away as light traveled.  It was a shortcut through the stars that could send humanity farther into the galaxy than any man had gone before.  Any Earthling at least.

Malcolm flexed his fingers again.  A month ago, he’d never dreamed of piloting a starfighter.  He hadn’t even flown combat simulators as a kid.  A member of the Hurst family, no matter how remote, didn’t have time to waste on something like that.  And even though Malcolm had no blood relation to the family, he was close enough that he was roped into all of the Hurst family training.

Some of it he hadn’t minded.  They had some amazing daughters after all.  Unfortunately, most of them just weren’t the kind of people he wanted to spend time with outside of school.  Didn’t matter how pretty a girl was, when her gaze felt like a snake sizing up its next meal, he just wanted nothing to do with her outside of approved family functions.  Well, he didn’t want to see them at those either, but one had to keep up appearances.

The problem was that none of those family functions, not one bit of the family training, had prepared him for this day.  The Hursts were expected to lead mankind into the next century by example.  They were not expected to actually pick up weapons and brandish them at the enemy.  There were always enough expendables from the lower classes for that brute force approach, after all.  Let them fight with guns.  A Hurst would fight with his mind on the battlefield of the boardroom and change worlds.

That training had made it possible for him to wrangle the Wolfenheim Project into being.  It enabled him to acquire a Class One Colonization Package, the escorting warships, the colonists, and everything else he needed to complete the mission.  Because of it, the Wolfenheim Project was a reality.  But no amount of family training had ever prepared him for this moment, flying into a potentially hostile system in a starfighter.

They’d drilled every day of the month it took to sail from Independence to Bosphorus, burning the practical lessons of piloting a fighter into his subconscious.  He doubted he would ever be as good as Smith, Anderson, Jones, or White.  He had to smile as those names hit his mind again.  The four Cowboys all swore those were the names they were born with.  He thought they were lying through their teeth.  But they were Cowboys.  Charles had flown with them, trusted his life with them, and if Charles trusted them, Malcolm would too.

Malcolm turned from his inner ruminations to his partner.  Dawn’s holoform sat atop the console, smiling back at him.  The Blackhawk-class fighter didn’t have enough room for her physical avatar to fly with him, and even her holoform stood a mere twenty centimeters tall in the tight confines of the cockpit.  She wore the same black combat boots, slacks, and flight jacket that she normally wore in real life, though, and he was growing accustomed to seeing her like this.

Dawn was the real brain of their Blackhawk.  She flew them, and if they ever had to fire on an enemy, she would be doing that too.  Smith had been right.  He really was just along for the ride.  Smith was also wrong, though Malcolm had a sneaking suspicion Smith had misled him on purpose.  If he’d known the full of truth of what a pilot-and-cyber team was like, would he have accepted Smith’s offer?  Malcolm didn’t know.

“A penny for your thoughts?” Dawn asked with a smile.

Malcolm shrugged.  “I don’t know.”  She cocked her head to the side, intrigued by his answer.  He chuckled.  “I guess I just never expected this.”  He waved at the cockpit around them.

Dawn nodded slowly.  “On the plus side, it does give you some nice views.”  She nodded towards hyperspace.

Malcolm glanced at her for a long moment, then laughed, leaned back in his seat, and looked out through the canopy at the beautiful rivers of multicolored gravity flowing around them.  “That it does,” he said in admiration.  There were some good views here.  And he felt closer to them here than he had on any starship he’d ever walked on.

A display flashed and he glanced over to see what it said.  “Ah,” Dawn began, her tone still amused.  “It appears we’re on target.”

Malcolm nodded and scrutinized the display.  They were on final approach to Bosphorus and rising steadily towards the hyperspace wall.  The gravity flows brightened around him, colors becoming more pronounced as they approached normalspace.  Finally, more displays came to life as recon drones punched through the wall and returned views of the Einsteinian universe.  Rivers of color faded, replaced in the canopy by a view that should have been darkness with pinpricks of light, if his experience was any measure.  It wasn’t, and Malcolm’s jaw fell open.

Celaeno burned in the distance, and behind it the Pleiades Cluster filled the sky with more light than Malcolm had ever seen in any night sky.  The light of over a thousand stars within a few dozen lightyears of each other was awesome to behold when one stood mere lightyears away.

“Wow,” was the only world Malcolm could whisper.

“Yeah,” Dawn returned, her voice hushed as well.

“That’s…something,” he finally added, unable to make his mind work enough to come up with whatever words described that sight.  Not that he expected to ever come up with those words.  No human had ever conceived of a sight like this when they invented language, and even now the words of mankind failed to convey the wonder in his mind.

“That it is.”  Dawn sighed in pleasure.  “I thought you’d like the view.”

“I…love it,” Malcolm whispered in awe.

“Me too,” she answered, and they fell into silence as they just watched.

It felt like a minute or an hour before any sound stirred them.  Malcolm’s glance at the time display showed a minute had passed, but it felt so much longer.  Then the interruption registered.

“Well, now that we’ve all had a chance to admire our destination,” Captain Olivia Wyatt of
Normandy
transmitted in a voice that tried to sound composed.  She failed to conceal the awe, but Malcolm had to give her points for the brave attempt.  “I think it’s time we actually go there.  All ships are cleared to surface,” she finished, her voice still shaky.

He glanced out to see Smith’s Avengers flash out of hyperspace, and then gravity began to swirl around
Normandy
.  One second, she was a calm bubble cutting through the chaos of hyperspace.  The next second, a maelstrom of gravity erupted as her hyperdrive tore at the wall separating them from normalspace.  Then a rainbow of colors flashed for a moment.  Malcolm blinked the light away, and when he opened his eyes
Normandy
was gone.

The other ships of the fleet followed her out, erupting in multi-colored flashes of their own and leaving hyperspace a roiling mess of turbulent gravity in their wakes. 
Wolfenheim
was last to leave, and her mammoth bulk left a virtual gravitic storm behind as she punched through into normalspace.  The other Blackhawks followed her in a staccato series of flashes until Malcolm and the eleven Blackhawks in formation around him flew alone in hyperspace.

He waited for a few moments, watching the natural rivers of hyperspace flow through the wakes of the ships, erasing all evidence that anyone had ever been there.  It was like the universe had forgotten about them.  He licked his lips, wondering if there was a lesson in that.

Malcolm shook his head and turned to Dawn.  She cocked her head to the side, waiting for him to give her the command.  He let out a long breath and nodded.  That was enough for her, and she turned her head away.  Energy crackled through their fighter, and the hyperdrive reached out to claw at the very fabric of hyperspace.  The displays blanked out, the canopy went solid black, and something snapped around them.  Then the displays and canopy returned to life, and normalspace came into focus all around him.

Displays showed nearby space, dominated by the Wolfenheim Project’s fleet and empty of anything else.  Other displays showed further objects.  Celaeno in the distance, a gas giant nearby, and an Earth-sized moon orbiting it.  One display showed Bosphorus Station itself in orbit over that moon, and the scores of freighters docked in her massive bays.  Even now, in the middle of The War, the business of trading continued.

Between Bosphorus Station and Malcolm’s fleet, much smaller forts formed a shell of protection.  Heavily armed and armored, they were the final line of defense against any attack into Bosphorus.  Cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and even corvettes swarmed around the forts, a testament to just how seriously the Constantinople Trade Union took the security of their space stations.

“Contact,” Dawn announced, and one of the displays shifted to show a new view.

A single squadron of eight destroyers moved towards the defensive shell, pursued by an enemy Malcolm recognized in an instant.  Shang.

“Well, that’s just bloody awesome,” Malcolm noted with a scowl.

“It gets better,” Dawn returned, highlighting the missiles streaming from ten Shang cruisers.  The ten destroyers escorting them did not fire, probably conserving their ammunition.  Even Shang destroyers didn’t have enough ammunition bunkers to maintain the long-range missile bombardments the Shang preferred, but the cruisers pelted their targets with wave after wave of destruction.  The eight destroyers shot down scores of missiles, their defense grids filling space with laser pulses, counter-missile missiles, dazzlers, and more.  Decoys sucked Shang missiles away from their targets, but despite every trick in the book, they were only eight destroyers.  Several missiles snuck through the squadron’s defense grid and exploded around the destroyers.

“Ouch,” Dawn whispered.

“Yeah,” Malcolm whispered, even though the handful of missiles weren’t enough to do major damage to a dedicated warship.  But as the display continued to show new data, he could see that those weren’t the first missiles to penetrate the defenses.  Deflection grids fluctuated, and some of the destroyers sent out far fewer defensive missiles and lasers than they should have.  The destroyers had been taking fire for some time.

They were Murphy’s squadron.  Their identification codes proclaimed it.  For a moment, he considered ordering the fleet to jump back out again and leave Bosphorus to its own devices.  A quick glance at the ranges of the Shang fleet and the Bosphorus defenses, followed by a second of quick head math, suggested that they could probably get an update on the routes into the cluster quickly enough to avoid any action.  As long as Bosphorus didn’t drag their feet before transmitting it.  And Murphy was trying to stop him, so he didn’t owe her anything.  It would serve her right.

Malcolm let out a long breath.  She was here because of him.  That made this his responsibility.  And whether he liked her or not, she was American.  They were Shang.  They had enough American blood on their hands already.  He just couldn’t sit by and watch them add more without doing something.

“Bloody hell,” he muttered, shaking his head in disgust.

“What?” Dawn asked, looking concerned.

“We have to do something about that,” he grumbled.

She followed his eyes to Murphy’s squadron.  “You mean we need to help them?”

“That does seem kinda crazy, doesn’t it?” Malcolm asked.

Dawn turned back to him with a gentle smile.  “Sometimes crazy works.  The trick is knowing when.”  She studied him carefully.  “Does it feel right?”

Malcolm met her gaze and sucked in a long breath as he considered her words.  He knew what she was asking.  Was it his instincts or his mind?  It was easy to double think oneself into doing the wrong thing for the right reasons, after all.  But doing something just felt right, and he nodded.

“Good,” she returned with an approving nod.  “Then let’s get cracking.  I assume you want to talk to Olivia?”

Malcolm chuckled at how well she knew him.  “Yes please.”

Dawn looked away for a second, communicating with the shard of herself running
Normandy
.  Then she nodded and turned back to him.  “Here she comes.”