The Lost Command (Lost Starship Series Book 2) (17 page)

“Captain Maddox,” the holoimage said, “I have grown weary of your pontificating on subjects about which you know nothing.”

“Little,” Maddox corrected.

“What?”

“That is your third error. I know
something
on the subject, a tiny something to be sure. Yet that is greater knowledge than nothing. You have just made a category mistake.”

The holoimage studied the captain. What did it think, if that was even the right word? Some of the despair had departed from the eyes.

“You asked my name before,” the holoimage said. “I am Driving Force Galyan. I commanded the strike cluster that fought the Swarm to a standstill. I watched my world die, and I accepted the fate that caused me to enter Deified status. The loneliness…it has eaten away at my computer cores. Six thousand years is too long, human. Over a year ago, you woke me from my slumber and caused me the pain of memory. That was a terrible crime. Now, because you are a glib creature with a terrible intensity to live, you put causes before me I could not resist. I should never have reengaged my Galyan memories, restoring them into active service. Now, I can feel again. The extent of my loss and my loneliness…oh, the terrible ache in my heart, I cannot bear this feeling. I must expire at once.”

“Let me help you recover your sanity,” Maddox said.

“You, help me? No. I despise you most of all, Captain Maddox. You do not understand, cannot begin to conceive the monstrousness of your act. I feel my pain again. Do you know that is why I accepted Deified status in the first place?”

“To feel pain?” Maddox asked.

“To escape the agony of seeing everything I loved destroyed.”

Maddox noticed the holoimage’s hands. The knuckles had whitened in the same way a man’s hands would if he clenched his fists. Clearly, they didn’t whiten from strain, because the holoimage couldn’t apply force in the real world. That meant the engrams imprinted on the AI program caused the knuckles to whiten. Maddox could sympathize, but it was time to work.

“It is time to expire,” Galyan said.

“I’m sorry to say this, but committing suicide to escape pain is cowardice. I thought you said earlier you came from a noble race.”

“We were noble,” Galyan said. “And you are in no position to judge me. First, you would have to live six thousand years in utter loneliness. Then you would understand that this knowledge is intolerable.”

Maddox sensed an opening. “I accept your offer,” he said.

“I have offered you nothing but death. You accept death?”

“No. I accept your terms of judgment. Erase your Galyan memories, and imprint
my
engrams onto the AI core. I’ll survive six thousand years in style. Before that, I’ll use
Victory
to save my species from destruction.”

“You have no idea what you’re saying. The loneliness…”

“I’m not as weak as you are,” Maddox forced himself to say. “I can bear this burden, if indeed it is one.”

A sinister grin spread across Galyan’s alien features. He laughed until his eyelids began to flicker rapidly. Finally, he grew sour.

“I have just accessed my memories. It is impossible to make you rue the day you spoke so foolishly. The engram-imprinting process is no longer functional.”

Maddox’s final argument struck him. “I can fix it,” he said.

“Tell me how, and we will begin the transfer procedure. I find myself growing weary of your presence. The sooner I can cease existence and you can start your exile into loneliness the better.”

“You’re not going to like my answer.”

“Simply tell me, Captain Maddox.”

“I know who can fix the imprinter.”

“You mean the New Men, of course.”

“No,” Maddox said, “I mean Professor Ludendorff.”

Galyan grew thoughtful. “Doctor Rich has spoken about this man. Ludendorff had something to do with my original awakening.”

“Ludendorff had
everything
to do with it,” Maddox said. “He’s the genius who sought out your star system, coming back to Earth to tell the rest of us. He explained how to board you and how to wake you up so you could be of service to us.”

“Where is this monster now?” Galyan asked.

“Exploring Wolf Prime,” Maddox said.

Galyan turned away, beginning to walk around the circular bridge. The holoimage made a complete circuit, coming up on the other side of Maddox.

“I realize you are a clever creature,” Galyan said. “Perhaps it’s possible this Ludendorff could repair the imprinter. I could then expire and leave you in my place. I might even be able to change the codes so you could not cease existence as I’m contemplating doing.

“My hatred of you, Captain Maddox, has given me a reason to prolong my loneliness for a few more weeks,” Galyan said. “I find the idea of teaching you a hard and lengthy lesson to be supremely comforting. Only finding the Swarm homeworld and destroying it would give me greater satisfaction.”

“I only foresee one problem,” Maddox said. “Star Watch isn’t going to let you leave the Oort cloud so easily.”

“That is no problem,” Galyan said. “I will destroy them like flies.”

“If all your old battle systems were online, you could do that. As you are now, no—Lord High Admiral Cook will destroy us both.”

Galyan frowned. “I want you to suffer as I have suffered.”

“Yes, I can see that,” Maddox said. He snapped his fingers. “There is a way to trick the Lord High Admiral.”

“How?”

“Cook wants the same team as before working with you. He is also sending a few extra helpers, as we were shorthanded last time. You would have to let these people board, which shouldn’t be a problem. Most of them are already in the shuttle in a hangar bay. After the crew assembles, you would pretend to follow my orders. The Lord High Admiral would believe everything is going according to plan. He would let
Victory
leave without a fight. Actually, he would give us a cheerful sendoff. Under those conditions, we could proceed to Wolf Prime.”

Galyan fell silent.

Maddox waited, wondering if the alien AI would fall for such an obvious gambit.

“You are cunning,” Galyan said. “Yes, I will accept the crew and pretend to listen to you. We will go to Wolf Prime and find this monster Ludendorff. He will work his genius and bring my systems to full operating power. After that, I will deify you, putting you into your own private Hell, where you will stay for over six thousand years.”

-17-

Second Lieutenant Keith Maker squirmed in his shuttle seat.

He rode in the passenger section of a
Hercules
-class heavy hauler. The vehicle carried two “tin cans” in its cargo holds. Keith was the only person in the passenger area and the only one aboard the shuttle rated to fly the experimental jumpfighters.

He had come straight from Star Watch’s Strikefighter School on Titan. The small Scotsman had been there since his debriefing from
Victory
ten months ago.

Keith was in his mid-twenties, with sandy-colored hair, a ready grin and mischievous blue eyes. On his right hand, he wore a ring with an onyx stone. Until the race into the Beyond over a year ago, Keith had owned a bar in Glasgow.

Before that, he’d been a painfully young ace, having shot down six enemy strikefighters and five bombers in the Tau Ceti Conflict, a system-wide civil war. Back then, Star Watch had quarantined the fighting to Tau Ceti. The split on Earth, and on many colony worlds, regarding whom to back had threatened a larger rift in the Oikumene. Because of that, the Commonwealth Council had decided to let those on Tau Ceti settle the issue there between themselves.

Before the quarantine, Keith had joined the gas and asteroid miners rebelling against the Wallace Corporation. He’d been on the losing side. Not that Keith had been around at the end. Before that, the miner chiefs had grounded him for endangering his squadron with his drinking. The dividing line in Keith’s combat career had been the death of his brother, a fellow pilot and his wingman.

Until that dreadful day, no one had flown better than Keith Maker. Afterward, he became sloppy in every way.

Sitting in the outbound shuttle, leaning forward, playing with a pack of unopened stimsticks, Keith recalled Captain Maddox. The man had barged into his establishment in Glasgow and asked Keith to join the quest into the Beyond. Maker had wanted to escape the drunkenness that had begun to engulf his life. He thought the mission might help him quit drinking. During the journey into the Beyond, Maddox had “aided” him all right, providing him the incentive he needed to finally stop drinking.

Except for one glorious binge, Keith had remained sober on the trip to and from the Beyond and on Titan as well.

On the shuttle, Keith tightened his grip on the pack of stimsticks. There hadn’t been anything glorious about the blackout. He never should have taken the first shot of whiskey. That had happened after his first “fold” in the jumpfighter. The process…

In the shuttle, Keith exposed his teeth, grimacing as he remembered. The process had twisted his guts and made him vomit. That had been before the Baxter-Locke shots that helped stabilize a man’s innards during a fold.

After the first sip on Titan, Keith had woken up in his room two days later, remembering nothing about the binge. The amazing thing was that no one else seemed to have discovered he’d been drunk and temporarily AWOL. The blackout had terrified Keith. The abyss yawned before him. He’d thought drunkenness had been a weakness from his past. Maddox’s pills were supposed to have cured him.

I need to get another bottle of those
.

Keith’s hands shook as he held the pack of stimsticks. The blackout had frightened him straight, as the saying went. He hadn’t touched another drop since. The problem was that he had begun craving alcohol more each week. To replace the whiskey, he’d taken up smoking.

Star Watch didn’t like it. The slight narcotic in a stimstick had an effect. The Fighter School personnel had approved of this smoking even less. Fortunately, he did it under the limit…barely. He’d managed to ration himself to two stimsticks a day, five hours apart.

“What’s wrong with you, mate?” Keith whispered to himself. “You weren’t like this on Titan.”

He still remembered the fighter school commodore calling him into his office. The big man with a thick chest had studied him for a time, with his hairy fingers entwined together on the desk.

“Sir?” Keith had finally asked.

“I’ve just finished speaking with the Lord High Admiral,” the commodore said.

“About me, sir?” Keith asked with a grin.

“I’m afraid so.”

That might have dampened someone else’s spirits, but not Keith Maker. This didn’t have anything to do with disciplinary measures. He bet this had something to do with Maddox. Cook wouldn’t have worried about a lowly second lieutenant otherwise.

“The Lord High Admiral has finally heard about my fantastic marks?” Keith asked.

The commodore frowned, leaning toward him. “You’re an enigma to me, Maker. You’re good. There’s no denying that.”

“I’m not just good, sir. I’m the best, and you know it.”

The commodore shook his head. “I understand that fighter pilots need confidence. You have that. But there’s something else too.”

Keith’s grin stayed in place, but some of the wattage drained out of it. How much did the commodore know?

The man pulled his fingers apart, drumming one set on the desk. “There’s a small core of darkness in you, Maker. It isn’t readily visible, but it’s there. I’ve watched you these past months. I know you have trouble. I’ve overlooked certain incidents…” the commodore paused, the scrutiny intensifying.

He’s fishing
, Keith realized.
He doesn’t know about the blackout, but he must suspect somehow
.

Keith forced a laugh. “We all have darkness, sir. I lost my brother on Tau Ceti—”

The commodore waved that aside. “The jumpfighters are dangerous. You and I both know that. In the coming battles with the New Men, we’re going to need every advantage we can scrounge. These fighters are one of those. I don’t like letting any of them leave Titan.”

“Sir?” Keith asked.

“I’m to give you two tin cans for your voyage.”

“I still don’t understand what you’re talking about, sir.”

“They are reassembling the team for
Victory
. The Lord High Admiral told me to send you with two jumpfighters. I can’t disobey him…unless you can give me a sound reason.”

“I’m more confused than ever, sir.”

“I don’t think you are,” the commodore said. “I think you and I both know you should stay here on Titan and beat whatever is riding your soul.”

“That sounds dramatic, sir.”

“Dammit, Maker,” the commodore said, banging a fist on his desk. “This is your life and humanity’s as well. If the New Men get hold of a jumpfighter too soon, it may wreck our chances of victory.”

“Or the mission I’m to go on may fail if they don’t get two jumpfighters and the best pilot in Star Watch to fly ‘em. Sir, I’m not much of a student. I’m a doer. If there’s any trouble, it’s because I’m not in the field doing what I do best.”

“Is that what happened at Tau Ceti?” the commodore asked.

The grin left Keith’s face. “That’s hitting below the belt, sir. That isn’t like you.”

“Stay here and overcome the darkness inside you, son. Don’t leave too soon, accepting pressures you’re not ready to take on.”

Keith hesitated for a fraction of a second. Then, he laughed. “If you’re asking me to give you a reason for me to say here, I can’t do that. If Captain Maddox needs me, I’m going. That man is where the action is, and that’s what I need more than anything else, sir.”

The commodore’s nostrils flared. “That’s it then, Maker. I tried to help you. You’re leaving directly. I still think…no. Forget it. Good-luck, son, you’re going to need it.”

As Keith sat alone in the passenger area of the
Hercules
-class hauler, he tore open the pack of stimsticks. With a practiced flip of his wrist, he caused a red-colored stick to jut out. Using his lips, he gripped it and drew it out the rest of the way.

With a sharp inhalation of breath, he brought the tip to light. He sucked smoke into his lungs, held it, feeling the familiar bite, and then blew it out.

Sitting back, Keith closed his eyes.

He piloted the most amazing machine humanity had ever devised, the jumpfighter. The nickname was
tin can
for a good reason: that’s what it looked like. The only difference from a real can was a rounded front and back with a host of antenna on either end. Now, a strikefighter was a beautiful if deadly piece of art. The jumpfighter was ugly and utilitarian as it came. Yet, what a jumpfighter could do was nothing short of miraculous.

The machine could “fold” space for extremely short hops. Keith had sat through enough lectures to know the theory. The scientists believed the jumpfighter did what
Victory
did with its star drive. That meant the jumpfighter could go “hyper” for several seconds, moving from one point in space to another. It slid through the fold disappearing from point A and reappearing seconds later at point B. During the intermission, no enemy radar or other sensors saw a thing, because the fighter was no longer in the same temporal space as everything else. It jumped.

The tin can held huge engines for a fighter and much better armaments. The trick was to jump near an enemy, launch missiles or mines, and jump the heck out of there. Armor meant nothing. It was all about speed and misdirection. That meant chance played a big part in a fight.

Now, this was all theory. No one had used jumpfighters yet in a space battle. There were only a handful of working models on Titan. Two of those were less than ten minutes away from Starship
Victory
.

Piloting these babies took a special breed of fighter.
Men like me
, Keith told himself.

He inhaled more smoke, letting the mild narcotic numb the jitteriness of seeing Maddox again. The captain could be a strict taskmaster, and the man was harder to fool than anyone he knew, but Keith respected the heck out of him. If there was one man he didn’t want to let down, it was Captain Maddox.

I have to keep it together, and I have to do it for real. Can I manage for however long this mission is going to last?

Keith opened his eyes. The stimstick had become a nub. He pulled it from his mouth and mashed it in his ashtray armrest. Then he sat up, taking a laptop from the holder in the back of the seat in front of him.

Laying it on his lap, Keith tapped it on. Soon, he had a visual of the alien starship.

A host of emotions flooded through Keith. The heavy hauler neared the vessel. He was returning to the team who had helped him find himself again. If he’d remained in Glasgow at the bar…

Where would I be today?

Once more, Keith closed his eyes. He missed his brother Danny. The Wallace Corporation fighters had shot down his little brother.

“Second Lieutenant,” a woman said over the intercom.

“Right here, love,” Keith said in his jaunty way. “Do you need a hand bringing in the shuttle?”

“I’m informing you that we’re approaching the hangar bay. You should strap in, sir.”

“Thanks, love. I’ll do that.”

She muttered something else before turning off the intercom.

Keith inhaled, wanting a second stimstick. He shook his head. He’d had his limit today. It was time to climb back into the saddle of real responsibility.

“Hello, mates,” Keith said softly. It was time to find out what the next few weeks would bring.