The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) (21 page)

The
Salamis
, Near
Chula 565

H
arry knew he’d found the right spot as soon as the data started coming
in. If they could force a fight here, they could make the enemy dance to an
Alliance tune. Chula 565 was a brute of a planet; a massive sphere of carbon
that pulled greedily at the fabric of space time.

“Lovely,”
Colonel Adams drawled, waving his hand over the trace table. A data call-out
appeared, describing the weather front they were looking at down on the surface
of the sinister world. “Not the kind of rain I’d want to go singing in.”

“Not unless
you want a mouthful of benzene every time you tilt your head up,” Commander
Flemming observed with a dry tone. “And at eight times the size of Earth, I
doubt you’d be doing much more than laying on your back, trying to catch your
breath.”

The carbon
planet had been mapped centuries ago by Weiran prospectors, constantly
searching for raw materials for ship hulls. Three large mining operations had
existed on the planet’s surface, but the departure of Weirfall from the
Republic had removed this world from their list of safe resource planets. The
gravity compensators at the mining sites had been shut down three years ago,
and the habitats were nothing more than empty shells, covered in a slick glaze
of hydrocarbons.

“Asphyxiating
in the rain,” Prouse grinned, uncharacteristically cheerful, now that action
was pending. “Might be a good idea to set up a parody contest, once we’re done
here.”

“Let’s make
sure we take care of the enemy first,” Harry said mildly, setting the table
back to the operational view. “What’s the probability of them passing along
this line?” He looked up at Flemming.

The
intelligence officer cleared his throat. “Eighty percent for a close pass, high
nineties for us to pull them back into normal space. I suppose it would be too
much to ask them to travel in nice organized waves?”

“We might
get a few lucky kills,” Harry replied doubtfully. “I’m pretty sure these are
going to be experienced security troops. You’re the one telling us that the
civil unrest indicators have been going up on the fringe worlds whenever the
enemy builds a concentration of forces.”

“They’re
getting so desperate for a quick resolution that they’re stripping the
counter-insurgency forces from nearby worlds.” Prouse looked as though he might
start dancing a jig at any moment. “We keep holding onto our three little
worlds and they’ll run right out of forces. They won’t even be able to enforce
tariffs, let alone fight rebels!”

Prouse
brought his right hand up to touch his ear. “Sir, the captured frigate is in
place.” He looked up at Harry. “Standing by to initiate.”

Harry
nodded. “Make a hole.”

The senior
staff all looked out the port side of the bridge. There was a brilliant flash
where the frigate had been and then the explosion seemed to shrink back to its
origin point.

And then
there was nothing.

The
Hexi Zoulang
,
Tauhentan Space

“N
ew
contact,” the sensor tech shouted. “Twenty Human vessels on the ventral flank.”

Reis subconsciously performed the small muscle exercises
that helped to bleed off the sudden surge of adrenaline. He still had the
larger force and he had no intention of breaking off his attack on the
Midgaard. He reached up to his order of battle tables and touched a finger to
three of the maniple groupings. He dragged the finger down towards the Humans
who were attacking from below and the corresponding ship icons duplicated,
their ghost versions following his finger toward the new enemy force.

The original icons began to move almost instantly,
redeploying to hold off the late arrivals. Fifteen could hold twenty long
enough for the main force to smash the impudent Midgaard.

Make that nine…

“New contact! Same bearing as the last but closer.” The
sensor tech was gripping the edges of his console, knuckles white and
straining. “We’ve lost six ships from the response force to their drop wash.

Hells!
Reis redeployed another three maniples,
committing a total of twenty four ships to hold forty.

But that left his main force on an almost even footing with
the Midgaard force. The enemy’s brash confidence no longer seemed so ill
advised. And they were now outnumbered heavily on the ventral flank. His eyes
grew large. Had he acted too rashly in dispatching the second reinforcement?
Had he fallen back on battle drills like a raw captain of the regular forces
when he should have relied on his own initiative?

The remaining nine ships could have held the new arrivals
for at least a hundredth of a day before they were destroyed. His forty five
ships could have pressed the Midgaard with reckless ferocity, crushed them, and
then, if enough remained of his force, he could have turned on the forty new
arrivals.

Though he knew he was right, it was too late to recall the
second response maniples. He fought the urge to curse at the lost opportunity.
He had allowed the enemy to control the decision cycle. He was reacting to the
enemy’s movements when he should have been the one calling the shots. He was a
flota of the Krypteian order, a force multiplier in his own right but he’d
failed to see that the enemy was pushing him around like a pawn on a
Shakh-Maht
board.

Nothing to do but to push the…

“New contact!” The sensor tech turned to him, his features
barely under control. “Twenty more
Earthers
, right on
the edge of our ventral flank! We’ve lost eight more to drop wash on top of the
eight we’ve lost to gunnery!”

Three waves so far. Each one closer than the last. Three
waves of plasma and weapons fire, growing closer with each arrival.

Reis was outnumbered on two fronts now. There was no battle
drill for this, and initiative was no longer an option. No bold stroke would
save thirty eight fully engaged ships from an enemy force that was more than
twice their size. It was a straight up slug fest.

The unthinkable tried to intrude and he pushed it angrily
aside. He was no gods-cursed insurgent and yet, the insurgents had survived to
plague the Republic for centuries. It galled him to realize that he was giving
it serious thought, but he was bleeding strength and there was only one
decision left to him that the enemy wasn’t dictating.

And then he
understood.

“Son of a clone!”
he muttered. This may well have been the enemy’s intent from the very
beginning. 

“Pardon,
Flota?” his second blurted. He had been standing nearby in a fit of growing
agitation as he watched the battle fall apart. He was a good officer but a
little over-zealous in his secondary role as the political commissar.

“Signal the
fleet,” he snapped. “We’re to fall back in good order to Gaemhaeg station.”

It was the
first time his second officer had ever failed to jump to any order.

“The
situation cannot be redeemed,” he said quietly. “Signal the fleet now!”

Gaemhaeg,
in orbit around Xo’Kam, was very close to Dactar. That couldn’t be helped, but
it was heavily guarded and he didn’t want to run the risk of dropping out only
to find the enemy had pursued them in the hopes of finishing them off.

He was
reasonably certain that they wouldn’t. If he was right, then he was dealing
with a brilliant enemy commander. One who thought, not just in terms of
destroying vessels, but rather of destroying his enemy’s resolve.

They were
hoping he’d take the news of this defeat to Gaemhaeg so it could spread. He
reached up to the holo controls as the ship shuddered out of regular space. He
brought up a system overview, showing the three worlds now under Alliance
control.

He felt a
new surge of hope as he saw the travel corridors that linked the worlds. He
re-set the holo with a wave and turned for his quarters. “You have the conn,”
he called to his second as he passed through the door at the back of the
bridge.

He would
give this force the victory it needed. He would multiply their effectiveness in
a way that a stand up battle never would. They would make the Alliance the
victims of their own success.

But first,
he needed to work out the details. The fleet could continue to Gaemhaeg for
now.

The Kinzell, Lychensee

D
wight ducked past a screen of red beads and stepped back out into the
warm rain. The spicy scents of the breakfast menu wafted out with him as he
stopped beside Emily. It was the morning of his third day in the Kinzell, but
he was only now beginning to see any of the place.

On the
morning of his second day, he had confessed his true role in the creation of
the plague, but she had simply nodded, as though she had been waiting to hear
it. He still wasn’t sure if he found that reassuring or terrifying. How many
others assumed he’d been involved in creating the deadly infection
?
Still, she hadn’t thrown him out.

He swatted
at a small round ball that hovered just above his head, apologizing to a
passing pedestrian who had to duck to avoid his elbow. It looked like the same
ball that had started following him when he first arrived, three days ago. It
moved higher, but it didn’t leave.

“You don’t
want to do that,” Emily warned him with a tone of sweet mischief.

“Why,”
Dwight asked as he glared up at the offending object.

“It’s a
marketing droid,” she explained. “Supposedly sentient but I’m not entirely
convinced. They observe your shopping habits and feed advertising recs to the
vid panels.” She waved a hand at one of the glass panels that extended out from
an alley entrance.

He looked
closely and, sure enough, a window on the panel had her name in Dheema
characters, along with an ad for intoxicants, vat grown meat, and electronics.
He looked at her with a grin.

She shrugged.
“They know what I shop for. It illustrates my point, though.”

“I don’t
see how. Why does that mean that I have to be nice to them? Just because…” he
trailed off as she began to laugh. He turned to see what she was looking at.

The entire
screen was now dedicated to the shopping needs of Dwight Young. It even had a
shot of Dwight’s angry face, no doubt taken as he glared up at the droid.
Ayholi’s
Butt Fungus Cream, for that itch that just won’t go away!
the screen
proclaimed in bold text.

Dwight could
feel his ears burning. At least half of the flowing crowd noticed the ad and
looked around for his face, chuckling at the embarrassing ad.

“You should
really apologize,” Emily advised, barely able to keep her laughter in check long
enough for the simple sentence.

“Apologize?”
Dwight blurted angrily. “To a droid?”

“A sentient
droid,” she corrected. “One with a devious sense of humor.” She nodded back at
the screen.

Uaevery’s
holistic medicinals will cure that explosive diarrhea, Dr. Young.
The new ad proudly proclaimed.
You’ll
never spoil a hot-tub party again!

“Devious
sense of humor or just a weird butt fixation?” Dwight groused. “All right!” he
shouted up at the hovering ball. Passers-by laughed. “I apologize for swatting
at you; can you please get off my back – or back side, in this case?”

The screen
went back to the usual mix of windows. They slid upwards as the targeted
individuals approached. Ads for Emily and Dwight remained at the very top as
they stood there. His now had a discrete ad for an etiquette school.

He followed
Emily into the seething mass of commerce, knowing he stood out like a sore
thumb, but he couldn’t help gawking at the sights. Every hawker caught his eye
and tried to draw him into a shop, still following him as he moved on.

“Don’t make
eye-contact with the shopkeepers unless you’re interested in the merchandise,”
Emily called back over her shoulder. “Otherwise it’ll take us all day to get to
Rosh’s shop.”

She must
have been exaggerating because it was only a twenty-minute hike. He figured
they had climbed at least ten levels, though it was hard to apply a concept
like levels to the exuberant sprawl.

They
arrived at a small shop, perhaps ten feet across, with an ornate rug inside its
open front. Two men inside got up to give her an enthusiastic greeting.

He followed
Emily’s lead and left his boots on the rug, nodding politely as she introduced
him to Rosh and Qut, the Yo’Thage brothers.

“They came
here from Tauhento ten years ago,” she said as she accepted a steaming mug of
tea with a grateful smile.

“A creative
mind can be a horrible prison if you live on a world that’s only allowed to
make weapons,” Rosh explained as he handed Dwight a mug. “Here in the Kinzell,
there were no restrictions, as long as you kept your elected official
happy.” 

“He means
bribe your councilor until you’re making too much money to ignore,” Qut
supplied. “Then you pay even more to get a visa to whatever world is allowed to
produce your big invention, but you still have to keep paying him at half rate
in perpetuity.”

“But at
least it lets people like you continue innovating.” Emily took a sip and closed
her eyes for a few seconds. “Speaking  of innovation,” she opened her
eyes. “How did the test go?”

“Our concept
has not been conclusively discredited,” Rosh said with a charming grin.

“You mean
your Hothmoen discriminator didn’t do anything?”

“You
couldn’t be more wrong,” Rosh retorted. “It sat there.” He waved helpfully at a
test bed on his workbench. “It also used up power and exasperated the both of
us to no end.”

“What was
this discriminator supposed to do?” Dwight looked blankly at his hosts.

“Hothmoen
was a great Oaxian
preist
,” Qut explained. “He was
employed by the system’s industry on his world to increase the efficiency of
heat sinks. He postulated that electromagnetic energy can only be emitted in
quantized form.”

“He
discovered quantum theory?” Dwight brightened.

“She said
the same thing,” Qut nodded at Emily. “But Hothmoen got there more than fifteen
centuries earlier.”

“Why would
a priest be tinkering with physics?” Dwight scratched at the back of his head.

Rosh looked
over at Emily and rolled his eyes. “Our scientists
are
preists
, Dr. Young.”

“All of
them?”

“Pretty
much.”

Dwight
frowned. “But
preists
deal in faith. Science is about
hard facts.”

“Are you so
sure?” Qut raised an eyebrow. “What you call quantum theory involves a hells of
a lot of belief or, if you prefer, faith. Your people are already aware that
observer expectation
playes
a major role in
experiments. You just don’t realize how much.”

“So the two of you…”

A nod from Rosh. “We trained at a monastery near Caurtez, on
our
homeworld
.”

“Huh.”
Dwight shrugged. “So, this
whatsathingy
does what
exactly?”

 Rosh looked
at Emily, getting a nod. “It’s for FTL communication.”

“Seriously?”

Qut nodded.
“We have no idea how the Dactari do it. It’s one of the best kept secrets in
the Republic – has been since they started using it a decade ago. We figure it
can be done with a sensor that operates in the Hothmoen scale. It should let us
observe wormholes that regular sensors would never catch.”

“But the
sentient processor isn’t giving us the results we need,” Rosh cut back in. “It
expects to see the results, but nothing happens.” He shook his head in
resignation. “We call them sentient, but I think that Hothmoen Theory uses a
different definition of sentient.”

“Maybe you
just need a real humanoid mind to make your observations,” Dwight mused 
as he leaned over the test bed and closed his eyes. His implant found nothing
but an illicit data hack from a nearby shop. He opened his eyes to find Emily
and the two brothers staring at him.

“What are
you doing?” Rosh asked.

“I was just
trying to see if you had it connected to any kind of transmitter.” Dwight
shrugged.

“Do you
have one of those Midgaard processors in your head?” Qut put a hand on Dwight’s
shoulder, an excited look on his face.

Dwight
looked at him guardedly. “Yes, it was put in a week ago. What’s the big deal? I
would have figured that kind of thing was child’s play here.”

“No,” Emily
shook her head. “That kind of gear has always been under the strictest control
in the Republic. Only a few elite units have ever been issued with something
like that.”

“Imagine
what separatists could do, if they had easy access to something like that,” Qut
said softly as he stared at Dwight. “It’s one of the reasons why they say you
never retire from the Obsidian Order, the Obsidian Order retires
you.
”

“Bet they
don’t put that in the recruiting ads,” Dwight said with a dry tone. “Anyway, I
have a Quantum chip in my head, so if you hook up a transmitter to your
discriminator, we can try it out.”

“Hmm, no…”
Qut ran a hand through his hair. “An RF connection would be too slow by several
orders of magnitude.” He looked at Dwight for an uncomfortably long time. “We
would need to use a Hothmoen bus.”

“
Ooohhh
!” Rosh looked at his brother. “Then he might be able
to communicate mentally, assuming he could find a path to his target.”

A nod.
“Maybe.”

“Wait a
minute.” Dwight grabbed Qut by the shoulder and turned the Tauhentan back to
face him. “What exactly is involved in this ‘Hothmoen bus’? I get the feeling
it’s not public transit for subatomic particles, and it sounds like you want to
attach it to my CPU.”

“Well
yeah.” Qut looked a little surprised at the outburst. “It’s no big shake. We
just pop down to Theil’s tattoo shop and he’ll hook it up. Should take no more
than a few minutes. He’s seen the specs on the Midgaard…”

“Tattoo
shop?” Dwight darted a glance at Emily. “Somewhere down there, a guy who’s
currently drawing flames on some guy’s ass is going to crack my skull open?”

“Crack your
skull open?” Qut grimaced.

“Dwight,
the CPU isn’t inside your brain.” Emily set her mug down on a workbench and put
a hand on his arm. “It’s in your sinuses. All Theil has to do is go in through
your nose and link up with the existing gear.”

“But a
tattoo guy?”

She
shrugged. “They’re the surgeons here. You know, my great-great-grandfather was
a blacksmith, and everyone in  Cromwell came to him when they had a tooth
that needed pulling.”

“I’d still
rather a proper dentist, thank you.”

“
Ughh
…” She rolled her eyes. “Theil’s still a better surgeon
than any doctor you’d find back home.”

Dwight was
about to reply that you couldn’t find many doctors on Earth anymore, but caught
himself just in time. Having no family of his own, he tended to forget that
others did. He didn’t want to keep reminding her of her own worries.

“Alright,”
he said quietly.