Warpath (32 page)

“It was,” Remmy
said from one of the workstations. The Medical Technician was
standing beside him, watching the holographic records pass above the
desk. “This guy led me right to it. The automated logs record the
aft airlock opening then closing right before the flash. The
D-Drive’s emitter array was then connected right before Kambis went
up. It looks like whoever did it knew what was going to happen to the
planet and when. It was disconnected right after the flash, so the
power build up would end in some sort of…” Remmy trailed off.

“Trans-dimensional
contamination event,” finished Ensign Rinett.

“Yeah, I’ll believe
that when Captain Valent starts recruiting Kawaii Kittens for his
next boarding team,” Remmy scoffed. “Some sort of high energy
event that renders biological matter inert.”

“It’s exotic
particles from an open dimensional rift passing through organic
matter, at best, you don’t know what they’ll do, at worst, they
prove to be too high energy and biological matter can’t survive. As
far as I understand it, that’s what happens when you open an
uncontrolled rift. No one on this crew had their suit sealed, so they
were killed instantly.”

“Except for the
Citadel Agent, who knew it was coming,” Stephanie said.

Finn started looking
through a ring of interface ports for something to match the computer
taken from the Citadel Agent as he listened in.

“I didn’t know she
was aboard, I wasn’t even aboard the Fallen Star when all this
happened, I was on the Triton, applying for assignment to Triton
Fleet when the whole attack took place. I never got back to the
Fallen Star. I don’t know anything about Citadel, well, no more
than Remmy.”

“That’s Officer
Sands, to you,” Remmy said.

“Sorry, Officer,”
Ensign Rinett said.

“Lieutenant Commander
Vega!” shouted an alarmed Triton soldier. “We found something.”

“Oh, no!” Ensign
Rinett said. “Don’t touch that!”

“What?” Remmy
asked. “You can’t even see where they are, or what they’re
doing, don’t touch what?”

Finn saw Stephanie rush
to the other side of the lab. “I need my team here, now. Everyone.”

Remmy handed Ensign
Rinett off to a pair of Triton Security Officers then joined Finn and
Liara as they walked quickly to the next aisle of workstations. There
were two rows of research grade stasis pods facing each other, with a
dozen on each side and workstation pedestals in the middle.

Finn joined Agameg,
where he was standing in front of one with a young woman inside.
“This scans very strangely,” he said.

“Stop scanning,”
shouted Ensign Rinett desperately, from across the lab. “No one was
supposed to see!”

“This girl’s DNA,”
Agameg said as he gently touched the transparent steel surface of the
pod. “I cannot believe what I’m seeing.”

“They’re all dead,”
Liara said as she finished her own scans.

Commander Davis joined
them, and was raising his own command and control unit to do a
focused scan when Stephanie waved him off. “Okay, stop. Wipe your
data, now,” she told him.

“I’m just doing my
jo-“

“I don’t give a
shit!” Stephanie burst. “You and your men will wipe everything
from your scan records on this area of the lab immediately, and you
won’t report this, you will not talk about this to anyone.”

“I outrank you,
Lieutenant Commander,” Commander Davis said. He looked at the scan
results then entered a command. His expression had completely changed
by the time he looked back to Stephanie. “I apologize. This is not
Fleet business. I’ve locked the scan results under a Top Secret
categorization. That’s the best I can do.”

“I’ll take it,”
Stephanie said. “Keep your men quiet on this.”

Agameg looked to Finn
with an expression of bewilderment and sadness. “The dead girl here
is Captain Valent and Captain Anderson’s daughter,” he whispered
over their private channel. “The other six girls are also the same,
but they are all damaged frameworks. This one is human.”

“I didn’t see that,
did I?” Liara asked, not privy to what Alaka was saying.

“Why would someone do
this?” Alaka asked over open proximity radio.

“I don’t know, but
we’re going to find out for the Valent and Anderson families,”
Stephanie said. “Liara, can you start digging into the logs and see
what they were doing here? I’m going to make sure that Ensign
Rinett gets sedated then carried to the brig.”

“We can take care of
that for you,” Commander Davis said. “My teams have cleared the
ship for the second time. There are definitely no hidden agents
aboard.”

“Thank you,”
Stephanie said. “Can you leave a squad to keep people off the ship
while we work?”

“No problem,”
Commander Davis said.

“Finn,” Stephanie
said, turning to him and Agameg. “You two go take a look at this
D-Drive and learn everything you can about it. I don’t have the
education or brains you two do, but if I’m right, and the logs
showing that the crew actually used this to get here a couple months
ago are true, then the whole fleet could start fighting over it.
Hell, the whole sector.”

“All right, we’ll
start working on it,” Finn replied. “You do realize that there’s
another prototype being built aboard Captain Valent’s new ship?”
he asked.

“I wasn’t
informed,” Stephanie replied. “So I’m the last to know about
this, okay.”

Finn started walking
away, towards the aft workstations, but Liara caught his arm. “Do
you think you two could do it from these work stations?” she asked,
motioning towards the pedestal workstations in the aisle between the
stasis tubes. “I feel like I’m being watched,” she said, eying
the stasis tubes to her left, where corpses in different conditions
were suspended in thick fluid.

“Yes,” Agameg said.
“All the stations are connected.”

Minh-Chu had to admit
that the feeling of piloting one of the new gunships was an
improvement over the Uriel Fighter he had gotten used to. The
controls were more robust, the thrust was higher, and the shields and
armour were far more resistant to damage. He could feel the mass as
he decelerated towards the Triton’s port side hangar. “Ronin,
this is Triton Flight, wave off, wave off. You are being redirected.”

The new course appeared
on Minh-Chu’s Navnet display and he veered away from the Triton
towards the Solar Forge. “Acknowledged, following course three
eight nine two five on Triton Fleet Navnet. Thank you for telling me
at the last possible second.”

“It was ordered from
a Lieutenant assigned to your ship, Ronin,” Chief Paula Mendle
said. “Good luck.”

“A Lieutenant,”
Minh-Chu said to himself. There was a great deal of personnel
shuffling, with Captain Valent’s crew growing to take control of
the Blessed Mission, or whatever the ship would be called once work
was finished on it.

He allowed the computer
system to send images directly to his visual cortex. He could sense
the ship’s shape, its location and which direction it was
travelling in. The wireless signals being sent to his cortex also
gave him a perfectly clear view of every direction around the ship.
Minh-Chu was still getting used to it, and it took a great amount of
focus, because he could see with his eyes at the same time. What his
hands and feet were doing in the cockpit was perfectly visible to
him, and there was a screen that the system blocked out while he was
‘sensing’ with his brain directly. It was the most recent
generation of Sol Defence technology, combined with systems from the
Clever Dream, but the visual cortex link was something that Lorander
left in the Solar Forge.

The more ships they
built, the more they modified and refitted, the more people
recognized that Lorander hadn’t just given them a facility to build
ships with, they gave them many new systems and improvements that
were easy to adapt, and even easier to learn. The ship already knew
him, and he’d only flown it for one patrol. His reaction speeds
were already much higher, and he could feel the thrusters turning,
firing, propelling him towards the Solar Forge along his desired
course. He could see everything around him. Tamber was still peeking
out from the shadow of Kambis, where red and yellow flames could
still be seen through black clouds.

The Blessed Mission was
half way into the Solar Forge’s main manufacturing bay. Millions of
tons of metal and other materials from old ships, parts of an old
orbital observation station were being fed into the top of the
factory. It would take three quarters of the Blessed Mission’s
current mass in materials to make all the modifications that Jake
wanted for his new ship, and the miraculous part was that it would
take only days.

Minh-Chu couldn’t
help but extend his course using Navnet so he could circle around the
entire extended Solar Forge. The broken hull of one of the Order
Destroyers was already almost in place for recycling, it hung in the
space above the forge, gutted and dark while small but powerful tug
bots worked to cut it down into smaller pieces. The lights Minh-Chu
could see on the Blessed Missions aft quarter were starting to go
out. The narrow rear of the ship was about to change. The schematics
for the ships’ rebuild illustrated that there would be four large
thruster pods added along with broad armour plating across the top
and bottom with two more hangars between.

There would be new
turrets, an extension to the existing beam weapon system, and an
array of main cannons added as well, bringing the ship’s firepower
to a level that would make most destroyers run from a one-on-one
fight. He’d also heard of a new system that was top secret, even
above his rank of Wing Commander. No one in his department was to
know it’s nature, at least not yet.

The indicator on his
heads’ up display telling him that the Solar Forge was ready to
take control of his controls for docking lit up, and he transferred
them to the computer. In under a minute, his fighter was slowed to a
stop, lowered to one of the starboard docking ports, then connected
to an airlock. He was still getting out of his seat when the airlock
door opened.

The Lieutenant he was
supposed to meet was on the other side of the door, according to the
indicators inside his helmet. He carefully walked across the small
interior of his shuttle, which was docked to the Solar Forge
sideways, then pulled himself up through the docking hatch. Gravity
switched on him as he passed through, the hatch was on the side of
the Solar Forge, so he grabbed a rail along the wall on the other
side, and tucked, so he rolled onto his feet. It took him a moment to
recover his balance, it seemed like the world just tilted ninety
degrees.

“I can’t kiss you
with your helmet on,” Ashley said.

He pulled his helmet
off. She was wearing a black and silver tube dress that was both
almost too short, and almost too low cut. The shimmering, stretched
cloth dress was one of his favourites on her, and she knew it, though
she normally wore it in red or blue. The new colours marked her as a
combat pilot, a new development since that morning, but she was
definitely out of uniform.

She was positively
beaming, her dark eyes were alive with excitement. There was good
news, and she couldn’t wait to tell him. Ashley wrapped her arms
around his neck and kissed him as though there weren’t crewmen and
women at both ends of the hallway. He closed his eyes and enjoyed her
warmth for a moment before prompting a surprised squeal from her by
abruptly pulling her closer. “Hey, stop mooshing faces, public
place here,” Alice said from behind Ashley.

Minh-Chu and Ashley
parted laughing. “Hi,” Ashley said to him. “Missed you this
morning.”

“Early patrol, first
time getting my hands on one of these,” Minh-Chu said.

“Good test?” Ashley
asked.

“It’s a great
fighter. What’s this about you being a Lieutenant now?” he asked.

“It’s all shaking
up,” Alice answered for her.

The couple started
walking towards the main hall leading towards the centre of the Solar
Forge, where a large Mess Hall that looked more like a ballroom had
been built. He could hear the rumbling ramble of voices at the far
end of the corridor as the doors opened and closed to admit an Ensign
in blue, marking him as a member of the engineering team.

“She got promoted to
Lieutenant, no more lead helmswoman title,” Alice told Minh-Chu.
“Nothing changed for you except for where you’re stationed.”

“That’s not exactly
true.” Minh-Chu said. “I have to put together three squadrons in
the next three days. I used to be in control of one, with a crew of
ten. Sure, they’re transferring everyone who can fly a combat
mission or operate a welding torch from Haven Shore to the fleet, but
I have to figure out how these people fit together to make a real
Space Superiority Wing.”

“You’re already a
Wing Commander, you know what that’s like. I’ve been ordered to
remain with the Rangers, I’m not even a part of Triton Fleet! Even
Remmy’s been given the opportunity to join up, but I’ve got
orders
to get
grounded.”

“Did you talk to your
Dad?” Minh-Chu asked.

Ashley’s nod told him
the answer only a second in advance of Alice’s mildly shrill
answer. “No, he doesn’t have time. First he was in an important
meeting, and I couldn’t even get through because I don’t have a
rank in the Fleet, then he was busy, now he’s on his way in to
Captain’s Mast, so who knows how long that’s going to take. I
don’t think he even knows I’m trying to get through to him.”

“He’s going to be
leaving the Blessed Mission and moving in here with the rest of the
crew this afternoon. He should be on the Solar Forge for a few days,
I’ll send him a notice telling him to contact you,” Minh-Chu
said.