Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest)

For Stellar Conquest Book One, Click Here:
Planetary Assault (First Conquest)

“Where there are three people, there are politics.”
– Attributed to Niccolo Machiavelli.

In the back seat his Weapons Systems Officer, or wizzo, William “Wild Bill” Hickman, said, “Last patrol for you, eh, V? Twelve hours and you’ll be on that transport back home to mama.”

“Yeah, thanks, Bill. Hard enough to concentrate on work without you making it worse.” Vango ran his eyes over his displays, both the physical, and the virtual overlay that used to be called “enhanced reality.” Everything appeared in the green.

“Sorry.” Wild Bill didn’t sound contrite. “You ready to open the package?”

“Sure, hit me.” Vango’s hands and feet rested on his manual controls, stick and throttles and rudder pedals familiar to pilots throughout history. Some fighter jocks relied only on their links, but his grandfather David Markis, who had taught him to fly on an old Cessna 180 at the age of eight back in South Africa, had branded the concept of redundancy onto his brain.

Wild Bill sent the command through his link that loaded the latest updates into the enhanced reality overlay. Optical vision faded, for a time replaced by the brain-fed virtual world. Together he and Vango swooped into artificial space, examining everything the thin fleet of fighters and recon drones dispersed throughout the Gliese 370 star system had reported in the last twelve hours.

“Whole lotta nothin’,” Vango said disgustedly.

“Nothing sounds fine to me,” Wild Bill replied philosophically.

“That’s because you’ve never been in combat. Nothing more fun than to blast the living snot out of some blobbos that are trying to blast you back.”

Wild Bill snorted. “Flyboys.”

“Yeah…all boys now,” Vango mused. “Too bad all our women are back on Afrana or Enoi pumping out babies, so we’re back to a bachelor military. Like the old days.”

“Old days you never saw.”

“Yeah but my dad and grampa told me a lot of stories. So,” he changed the subject, “how’s your girl? What’s her name, Yuki?”

Wild Bill replied flatly, “Ah, we broke it off. The first kid changed her. She loves being a mom but she doesn’t want to be a wife. Said she can get any man she wants now, with all the breeding they are pushing. Guess she doesn’t want me.”

“Aw, man, that’s hard. Sorry, I didn’t know.” They cruised in awkward silence for some tens of minutes. Over their shoulders, at more than ten AU, the system’s orange dwarf sun shone just another star in the background.

“Ready to deploy the feathers?” Wild Bill finally asked as they approached their patrol area well outward of New Jove.

“Not yet. Let’s do something different on our last patrol.”

“As long as we don’t become the
lost
patrol…you’re the pilot, I’m just along for the ride.”

Vango thought to himself that he might prefer his old wizzo Helen’s combativeness to Wild Bill’s
laissez-faire
attitude. “Okay. There’s a high-albedo comet about two million klicks out that got missed on the initial railgun strike and has migrated out here. I don’t think anyone’s ever taken a good look at it. No drone on it. Who knows, might be an old Meme installation still there.”

“Whatever you say, boss.”

“Do you ever get excited about anything, Bill? Or is that handle a complete contradiction?”

“With the right stimulus I might. Your wife got any single friends?”

“I’ll ask her the day after I see her. Burn in fifteen. Let’s see how much ol’
Weaver
can handle.” Vango set up the trajectory then on the mark lit their fusion engine, accelerating at over one hundred Gs. Balanced gravplates inside the cockpit kept the forces inside manageable, but even so they both felt the brutal acceleration bleed through the link. Eden Plague healing virus, bloodborne nanites and cyberware kept both men functional, but not comfortable.

Half an hour later they turned over and decelerated just as vigorously, in the end to approach the iceball slowly, carefully. Drifting by at easy scanning speeds, Vango brought the Crow around to the other side of the five-kilometer sphere. “Big bastard,” he muttered. “Hardly see anything this large anymore. Meme
must
have put something on it.”

“Yeah, right there.” Wild Bill put an icon over the anomaly he’d spotted, then made it flash. “Just an old Sentry base. No heat sig, it must be dead.”

Delicately Vango eased the fighter in closer, tapping the thrusters to keep
Weaver
lined up properly. “Looks like a center hit with a maser. Patrolling Crow most likely, early on before we got real organized. They killed it and just left it here, didn’t file a report.”

“Well, somebody’ll eventually want to use the comet. Lots of good stuff in there. Fifteen or twenty cubic kilometers of water for starters. Prep a marker package and an eyeball.”

“Roger that.” Bill readied a listen-ping beacon and a static sensor as Vango maneuvered them in close. “Package away.”

Plunging into the icy surface, the little drone immediately extruded clamps and crampons, digging itself into the frozen water slush. As soon as it registered solid, Bill commanded the sensors to extend. Soon the thing resembled a metal plant with a two-meter stalk, complete with comm-dish flower.

“Excellent.” Vango goosed the fighter slightly to get it moving away from the planetoid filling half their view. “Wait a minute.” Strengthening the virtual overlay, he pointed with a mental cursor. “What’s that?” He swung the fighter back and forth on its thrusters, suddenly alert.

“Hmm. Not sure. Asteroid fragment?” Three years ago the battle for this system had turned hundreds of thousands of asteroids into hundreds of millions of pieces, characterized by their rough-edged appearance. “Quit squirreling around and let me deploy the high-res scope.” From under one of the fighter’s four wings a hatch opened, and out slid a telescope. Focusing on the anomaly brought it into sharp relief.

Vango mumbled, “Uh…what the hell?”

“Can you stop fidgeting and hold
Weaver
really steady? There…laser doppler ping…max magnification on the optics.” Bill took a deep breath. “Oh. My.”

“That’s no fragment. That’s artificial. That’s a ship, and not one of ours. What’s the range?” Vango asked.

“Unknown. The pulse hasn’t returned.”

“Hasn’t returned? That thing can’t be that far away.”

“I ain’t arguing, boss. Just saying, it hasn’t returned. Every two more seconds means 300,000 klicks farther away…and it’s been twenty seconds.”

“What do you think that means?” A plaintive note had crept into Vango’s voice.

“I guess it means it’s big and distant. At ten million klicks, simple geometric comparison says it’s…bigger than
Conquest
. By a lot.”

“And we just fired a ranging pulse at it.” Suddenly a feeling of deep unease came over the pilot. “Time to go.”

Wild Bill barely pulled the delicate telescope inside the fighter before Vango swapped them end for end, pointing
Weaver
’s nose back toward New Jove and the carrier
Temasek
. “Tell that eyeball to lock onto that thing and transmit video on command. I’m dropping a feather,” he went on, releasing one of the Crow’s tiny scanning drones. “Set it to stay near the comet in beamcast relay mode.”

“Yeah…okay. Done. But I think we’d better go. Now.”

“Setting up the burn already…why?”

“Because the doppler says it’s coming this way.”

Trissk was determined that would change.

Every few shiptime days or weeks
Desolator
visited and scouted a new star system, which meant that each time Trissk listened to the same debate from his perch, and learned much. On the mere edge of adulthood, yet he had something of an elder’s knowledge of politics. Other than his workshop, eavesdropping constituted his primary pastime.

What else was there to do? Endless fur-fights as dejected warriors sought to retain their skills and teach them to their kits without proper equipment? Perusing once again the meager store of knowledge salvaged from personal computers, augmented by the slow and miserly drip of information from the ship’s AI? He was hungry not only to
do
, as all Ryss warriors were, but to
know
.

“This time is different!” he heard Elder Chirom, perhaps the least conservative among them, argue. “Our taps show we are outside of a non-Meme system for the first time since the Fall. Even better, there are two other races here, and they are cooperating with each other. Shall we Ryss wander the starways endlessly, watching the universe age while we grow slowly old? We must demand Desolator make contact. Perhaps it will finally let us go. Perhaps we shall have a home.”

“Why should aliens welcome us?” growled the aged Kirst’aa, Eldest Mother, ears back and nostrils flaring. The slit pupils of her rheumy eyes had widened in the dimness, giving her a spectral look.
She will join the Ancestors soon…but not soon enough
, Trissk thought uncharitably, swallowing his frustration.

“Why should they not? There is evidence of a battle here. Perhaps the Meme have been beaten in this place.” Chirom crossed his arms, putting his paws inside his warm robe’s sleeves.

“Or perhaps not,” the ancient female snarled reflexively. Trissk expected nothing different; her favorite word was
no
.

“What can it harm to find out?”

No, you are doing it all wrong
, the young watcher thought.
She thrives on opposition…you must hold out something she wishes, as well as something she does not, and get her on your side.
He longed to leap down and make his own arguments, but they would not listen to him, a maneless male. If he did so they would unite against Chirom, guilty by association.