Serengeti (5 page)

“What’s happening?” Henricksen asked her. “What’s out there,
Serengeti
?”

“I don’t know.”

A chilling admission coming from an AI. The mood on the bridge turned decidedly tense.

The Number Two probe drifted closer, camera picking up an object just exiting the breach, sending the video feed back to
Serengeti’s
bridge.

“That’s a ship, alright,” Henricksen said, studying the feed. “Hard to tell from here but it looks like…Titan class? You supposed that’s—”

“
Osage! Osage! Osage!
” an electronic voice yelled, screaming through the ship’s speakers.

Not good. Not good at all.

“
Osage! Osage! Osage!
”

“Goddammit, Kusikov! Cut that thing off.”

“Aye, sir. Sorry, sir.” Kusikov mashed at his panel until the artificial voice finally shut up.

“
Osage,
” Henricksen grunted, staring at Number Two’s feed. “But that wasn’t
Osage
herself, was it?”

“No,”
Serengeti
said quietly.

The AI should have announced the ship’s arrival. Or the captain or comms officer if the AI was disabled. But the voice that poured through her speakers sounded pre-recorded.
Serengeti
tapped into the comms channel, listened to the voice for a few seconds, analyzing the speech patterns until she confirmed her suspicions.

“So. Is it?” Henricksen asked her.

Serengeti
cut the comms. “Is what what?”

“The ship out there. Is it
Osage
?”

Hard to tell, honestly. The ship was Titan class—the data the Number Two probe sent back made that much clear—but its electronic beacon was badly scrambled, the information it put out so garbled that
Serengeti
couldn’t make heads or tails of it. And when she reached out, searching for
Osage’s
AI mind, she found nothing. Just a blank space and a wall.

“Number Two’s coming in visual range,” Finlay announced. She reached for the camera controls, panned the lens around as Number Two came head-on to the intruder and then slipped around to its side, and the letters written in bold, slanting font.

“
Osage
,” Henricksen breathed. “Dammit. Dammit all to hell.”

Osage
had found them, but
Osage
was dead. Well and truly dead. Holes showed in the grey-skin of her hull, rents scored along both sides, tearing through her triple-walled hull, exposing her skeleton and the corridors underneath to the vacuum of space. And the damage didn’t stop there. The ship’s back end was gone. Just gone—ripped away entirely, leaving snaking lines of cables, circuitry and shredded hull material trailing behind her, and a cloud of metallic debris floating long in her wake.

“What happened to her?” Sikuuku whispered. “What the
hell
happened to her?”

“And where’s she been?” Henricksen added. “Shredded as she is, how’d she manage to make jump?”

“Where’s
Veil of Tears
?”
Serengeti
wondered.

She saw something—a bright red sparkle just inside
Osage’s
hull—and took the controls from Finlay without asking, steering the Number Two probe inside the damaged ship and then panning its cameras left and right.

“
Osage
is accelerating!” Finlay called, voice filled with alarm.

“Accelerating?
How
?” Henricksen demanded. “Thing’s a wreck! Half the bloody engines are gone!”

“Don’t know, sir, but she’s moving. Looks like she’s got one engine that’s still operational and she’s using that to push herself along.”

“Goddammit. What the hell’s going on?” Henricksen growled.

Good question
.
Serengeti
studied
Osage
a moment, watching the dead ship drift closer, wondering where she’d gone, and how she’d gotten back.

A perimeter alert popped up, flashing brightly, screaming for her attention.

“Breach forming off the starboard bow.”
Serengeti
pulled back, refocusing on a patch of inky darkness swirling to one side.

“Distance?” Henricksen asked.

“Five hundred kilometers.”

A last look at
Osage—
sister ship and companion. A last moment to wonder where the ghost ship had come from, how anything was still operating when the AI inside was dead.

Where were you, sister? What happened to you?
Serengeti
wondered.

She considered a moment and then tapped into the Number Two probe, streaming its position in real time to her AI brain so she could track
Osages’
location.

More alarms, proximity alerts lighting up faster than
Serengeti
could address them. She abandoned the probe, letting one of her sub-minds monitor the feed as she swiveled electronic eyes to the darkness outside.

Multiple breach signatures now, buckles forming, creating black voids that sucked inward before blowing back out. She threw a schematic on the bridge windows, marking each new breach as it formed, waiting for ships to appear as they exited jump. One breach became ten, then twenty, then fifty, with more and more forming every minute.
Serengeti
added each new contact to the schematic and, slowly but surely, a pattern began to emerge: A thick crescent of buckles arcing around the armada’s port side.

“Talk to me Finlay!” Henricksen called. “What’s going on out there?”

“
Osage
is closing.”

“Forget
Osage
. How many, Finlay? How many breach signatures are out there?”

Finlay worked at her panel a moment and then froze, staring hard as the stars lit up outside and the first of the ships appeared. Data came through—a name and call sign, all the electronic information an interstellar vessel endlessly squawked out. More flashes—a dozen on either side of that first arrival—accompanied by more data, more information for
Serengeti
to pour through. She processed it in a moment, found nothing but bad news. And then she waited, watching Finlay chew at her lip, taking it all in.

“I count…a hundred. Hundred and three. Hundred and five. Hundred and—holy,” Finlay breathed, eyes widening, looking surprised, and worried, and a little bit scared as more and more ships popped into existence. “It’s them, sir.” Finlay half-turned, looking behind her. “I think we found them. I think we found the DSR fleet.”

“Fuck,” Henricksen swore. “This is all going backward.”

“But we
found
them—”

“
They
found
us,
Finlay.”

“Oh,” she said in a small voice.

The whole idea of sending the scouts ahead—and
Serengeti
after them—was so they could get the drop on the Dark Star Revolution. Scan their capabilities and see what they were up against before it all went sideways. Instead, it was the DSR who’d gotten the drop on them. They had
Brutus
to thank for that.
Brutus
who’d so foolishly brought the rest of the fleet in.

“Must’ve been watching this place. Left a probe or a beacon somewhere. Something too small for the scans to pick up. Something cloaked maybe. Hidden.” Henricksen frowned at the schematic, muttering curses as ship after ship flashed into existence, completing the crescent walling them in on one side. “What’s the count, Finlay?” he asked again.

“Twenty-three ships transited from jump so far. Looks like…another hundred and three buckles resolving. Hundred and thirty vessels in total, sir. Most of those yet to transit.”

“Hundred and thirty,” he muttered. “Thought there were more.” He reached to one side, querying the system, frowning at the information it brought back. Henricksen looked up at the camera, pointing a finger at the screen and then tapping at a single piece of data. “Two hundred sixty-three,” he said softly. He flicked his eyes to the windows, then back to the camera. “System said a fleet of two hundred sixty-three ships attacked Tissolo. Satellites around the planets confirmed that information. So where are the rest of them?”

Serengeti
checked the data, confirming the scan results and Finlay’s count. “Scans are empty. Perhaps they divided. Left this group to play rear guard while the rest slipped away.”

“Or the rest of the DSR ships are waiting out there somewhere, just outside our scans’ range.”

“Or that,”
Serengeti
acknowledged.

“I don’t like this.” Henricksen stared at the camera a moment longer, then glanced out the windows, watching the gap between the Meridian Alliance fleet and the DSR vessels slowly close. And far out—port side and still several hundred kilometers distant—was the lonely blip of
Osage
, tracking ever so slowly toward the fleet that once claimed her. “I don’t like this at all,” he said, eyes flicking between the DSR ships and
Osage’s
beacon. “Something’s not right. Kusikov—send word to the fleet. Tell them to take up defensive positions and ready themselves for jump.”

“
Brutus
won’t retreat,”
Serengeti
warned him. “Not now. Not after two weeks of fruitless chasing.”

“A hundred and thirty ships against a force nearly three times that size. This is wrong and you know it,” Henricksen said quietly. “The DSR’s desperate but they’re not
that
desperate. And they’re certainly not that stupid.”

He was right, of course, and from the objections pouring in—peppering
Serengeti
and the other Valkyries, bypassing the Dreadnoughts who they knew wouldn’t care—the Titans and Auroras weren’t liking
Brutus’
orders any better.

Serengeti
sent a message to the Bastion and
received a response in return reminding her of her place, ordering her to form up with the others and mind her own business.

So much for that idea.

“
Brutus
has ordered the fleet to come about.”

Serengeti
sent instructions to Nav and Engineering, fired up her maneuvering thrusters and turned her bulk hard to port. The rest of the fleet turned with her, forming a wedge shape with
Brutus
at its middle and the Dreadnoughts ringing him about. The Titans and Auroras shifted and drifted, some moving forward, others back, creating a spearhead in front of
Brutus
and the Dreadnoughts and a thick shield wall behind.

Serengeti
and the five other Valkyries moved to the outside of the wedge, spacing themselves widely so they could guard the armada’s edges and still bring all their guns to bear. Six Valkyries. Just six to watch over this armada, and twenty Dreadnought bruisers to guard
Brutus
himself. Not something to sneeze at normally, but deep down,
Serengeti
wondered if it was enough.

Have to be
. Cerberus
himself has spoken.
And in his AI wisdom, deemed six and twenty to be ‘sufficient’ for dealing with the DSR rabble that attacked Tissolo.
Hope he’s right, Serengeti
thought.

She fired her maneuvering jets and assumed her assigned position on the starboard side of the fleet.
Marianas
and
Atacama
followed suit, maneuvering around the smaller ships so they could slot in behind her, while
Antigone
cruised over to the port side with
Seychelles
and
Sechura
in tow. And when it was all done—when the last ship was finally in place—the Meridian Alliance turned their eyes forward and waited for the DSR ships to come into range.

“God I hate this part.” Henricksen stared at the bridge windows, lips twisting sourly as he studied the schematic showing the Meridian Alliance ships and the approaching DSR fleet. “So, this is his grand plan? We punch through the middle of their blockade and then circle around and hunt the remaining ships down?”

“The theory is sound.”
Serengeti
hated that answer but it was the best she could offer.

“Theory,” Henricksen snarled, hands slamming hard against the panel in front of him. “The
theory
is crap! Stupid, arrogant, son-of-a-bitch. He knows there’s more to this than meets the eye but he just won’t back down. Bastard shouldn’t even be here.
Fleet
shouldn’t be here. Smartest thing we could do is retreat and regroup. Come at them another time.”

Serengeti
thought a minute, recognizing the sense in what Henricksen said. She
relayed a message to
Brutus,
urging caution, asking the Bastion to rethink this whole matter and consider pulling the fleet back.