The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) (6 page)

The
Midway
, Weirfall
Orbit

“I
t’s
like a rave in here.”

Dwight turned at the sound of Towers’ voice. This was the
first time the Marines had stayed outside the lab. He had asked several times
that they not accompany the admiral into the lab. His only objection was their
startling habit of shouting out “Admiral on deck!” every time Towers walked in.
That kind of thing was fine in a mess hall, but he’d nearly dropped glassware
every time. He looked up at the ultraviolet lights that they had scrounged from
labs on Earth before coming out to join the fleet.

“How bad is it?” Towers came straight to the point.

“Well, the bioreactors are still intact, but we lost a few
of our cultures when we got hit.” He could see Towers’ teeth, bright white neon
chips as he grimaced in the disinfecting light. “That’s why we have the light
show going on. This place is filled with retrovirus.”

“How far back did it knock us?” The admiral was referring to
the near hit from an enemy nuke. A small civilian passenger carrier had jumped
into the coordinates that the
Midway
had occupied only hours before. As
soon as its crew realized that they had failed to hit their target, they
detonated a small nuclear warhead, damaging the Alliance flagship but certainly
not destroying her.

Just over two hundred crew had been killed and parts of the
hull were compromised, but it was being fixed with reluctant assistance from
Weiran shipyards. Dwight’s production facilities had been shaken up, but he was
quickly getting everything back on track.

“Maybe half a week?”
Dummy,
he reprimanded himself.
Towers hated evasive answers. “Half a week,” he said again with more
conviction.

“Damn.” Towers looked around the room. “Dr. Young, we need
to speed this up. The longer we take to inoculate the fleet, the worse our
morale gets. I’ve got thousands of young men and women with a sword hanging
over their heads. They look at each other and wonder who’s going to be a part
of the unlucky two percent.”

“How about getting them to hear from the crew on this ship?”

“What’s that, Doctor?”

“Yeah, you know, a video of crew and officers from the
Midway
that you can show to the fleet.
Hi, I’m leading seaman Smith and my life
expectancy is three thousand five hundred years.
” Dwight looked down at a
blinking light on one of the hybrid bioreactors. “Give them some of the
positives of the whole thing to think about.”

“The
only
positive in this whole mess,” Towers
corrected. “You might have something there. I’ll get the PAFFO on it right
away.”

“The what?”

“Public Affairs Officer,” Towers grunted. “Mostly just does
media relations and the weekly fleet newsletter, but this would be right up his
alley or, at least, it better be, or my foot
will
be.”

He nodded to himself, turning for the door, but he stopped
as the panels slid open and turned back to Dwight. “Just get this done as fast
as you can, Doc. I’m hearing talk of mutiny and we sure as hell can’t afford to
start losing ships to fear. The whole damn fleet can fall apart easier than you
might think. This situation,” he waved a hand around the lab. “This is a powder
keg. The sooner we’re done, the better.”

“Mutiny?”

“Keep that under your hat. I only told you because I need
you to understand how desperate our situation is.” He took a deep breath. “It’s
always been hard – keeping this alliance together – but with the specter of a
meaningless death hanging over everyone’s head… The simplest thing could
trigger a mass exodus and this fleet will tear itself apart.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Less than you want. Just get it done before we end up
having to run for home with the Dactari picking us off, one by one.” His voice
grew quiet. “Now that we’ve proven we’re a threat to them, they’ll jump at any
chance to bring mass drivers back to Earth. We captured the last five they sent
but this time they’ll sling asteroids at us until Earth can’t support life.”

The
Dark Defiance
,
Jupiter Orbit

T
ommy,
Kale and Gelna stood on the bridge, looking down at Jupiter’s ‘Great Red Spot’,
a storm the size of Earth that had first been spotted by telescope in the
1700’s
. “Are we sure we want to do this?” Tommy muttered.
“Our species isn’t exactly looking its best right now.”

All the more reason,
Keeva replied.
What if he
should emerge a century from now? He might react as I did when I saw the mess
on Khola and decide to sterilize the planet and start over. I’ve seen the
databases on your ‘Web’ and I don’t think you looked terribly promising before
the plague anyway.

“We weren’t that bad,” Kale said. He looked over at Gelna,
giving the captured medical officer a light thump on the shoulder. “Don’t look
so smug, Doc. You just wait till we get to Dactar.”

You were headed for disaster, plague or not. You were
still using fossil fuel, yet I could see that your governments were desperately
struggling to hide the fusion technology that you had captured from Gelna’s
people. They seemed perfectly willing to protect the fossil fuel economy beyond
its feasibility, holding on to power at the cost of mankind’s future.

“Really?” Tommy replied. “With all the nuclear weapons we
built, all the wars we’ve waged against each other, you pick the oil industry
as the main reason we might be wiped out by the
Cold Determination
when
she wakes?”

How do you know the ship will be a female?
 Keeva
asked.
It could just as easily have a male as its current symbiote.

“It’s just a convention in our language to refer to ships as
‘she’,” Tommy replied. “The Russians call them ‘he’, I think.”

I see.
She sounded amused. Over the years, they had
come to realize that she had kept her humanoid sense of humor when she had been
joined to the ship’s systems.
And yes, I do see the oil industry as one of
the reasons you would have suffered disaster. The wealthy oil corporations
practically owned your administrations. They prevented competition, as any
corporation will, and they were behind the suppression of Dactari fusion
technology for the last decade. You could have had unlimited energy by now.
Famine would have been a thing of the past.

“You can’t eat electricity,” Kale said with an air of
certainty.

No, but you can use it to de-salinate an endless supply
of seawater for irrigation. You can transport that water to drought stricken
regions at no cost and you can power the transportation of produce from farms
to cities. Many of your nations have lived through fuel shortages but quickly
forgot the fear, the long lines for rationed gasoline.  Imagine what would
happen to your cities as the fuel grew scarce.

“The lorries would stop rolling, I suppose,” Tommy admitted.
Living among the farms of Guernsey had insulated him from such concerns.

And mass starvation would follow. You allowed the greed
of a small elite to destroy your future.

“Aren’t we supposed to be coming up with reasons for the
Cold
Determination
to
not
wipe us out?” Kale muttered. “Hell, I’m almost
convinced we should do it ourselves at this point.”

“There,” Gelna cut in, pointing down at the planet. “That
black speck.”

They all leaned forward, straining to see the ship. Even
though it was more than forty kilometers in length, it would be a small thing
against a storm forty thousand kilometers wide. Nonetheless, the speck quickly
grew into a ship as she rapidly ascended to meet her sister.

Dark Defiance, why are you here?
The voice appeared
in Tommy’s head. It sounded like a male, but it was hard to be sure.

I have come because many of the worlds we watch over have
gone through startling changes since our last emergence. I was so dismayed by
what I found on my own charge that I almost sterilized the planet for
re-seeding, but the life forms you see standing on my bridge have helped me to
see that the chaos breeds resilience and creativity.

Two of these appear to have come from my charge,
the
awakened ship said in apparent surprise.
If this is true, did they find
their own way to your world?

They did. Interstellar travel is now becoming quite
common.

Excellent! Are there many multiple-planet societies?

We met a few. It’s gratifying to see.

I can well imagine, it’s nearly impossible for such a
civilization to be destroyed from without, but enough about that. What are your
names?

“My name is Tommy Kennedy.”

“Kale Thompsen.”

And what name do you give our world?

The ‘our’ was not lost on Tommy. This ship was definitely
invested in the future of its charge. He hoped that was a good thing. “We call
it Earth,” he replied. “What was
your
name, before you became the ship?”

Before your people discovered steel, I was a young man
named Camulos.

Tommy felt a shiver as the name sunk in. “You’ve walked
among our ancestors, haven’t you?” He noticed Kale’s questioning glance out of
the corner of his eye. “There was an ancient Celtic deity of the same name – my
dad’s a huge Irish history buff.” He looked out at the other ship. “Was that
you?”

It was, young
Thommy
, and I can
see that you share several genetic markers with some of the people I knew,
though they didn’t think of me as a deity at the time. Rather flattering, now
that I think about it.
There was unmistakeable mirth in the tone of his
thoughts.

“Are you saying you knew some of my own ancestors?”

The database tells me I associated with humans whose
genes now reside in you, though it was many centuries ago and I can only claim
to remember one of them. His name was Brian Boruma, the first of the Ard Ri na
hÉireann.

“That’s not English, is it?” Gelna turned to Tommy.

“No,” Tommy answered quietly. “It’s Irish
gaelic
. It means the high king of Ireland.”

“Well, you’re still gonna do your share of cleaning and
cooking,” Kale snorted. The three had originally each claimed their own
apartments from among the long-abandoned high rises of the massive city-ship
but boredom and loneliness had soon driven them to share a large penthouse
suite not far from the bridge. “Half of Ireland probably has some of his
genes.”

“It’s a given, then, that you’re familiar with the chaos of
Human development.” Tommy ignored Kale’s comment, though he had to admit it was
a bit of a thrill to learn he was descended from a king. Even though, as Kale
mentioned, it was probably pretty common, it was still a pleasant surprise to
hear definite proof.

I am. It certainly seems that you’ve made a mess of
things. From the data you’re showing me, it looks like you tried to kill
yourselves off while I rested.
There was a pause.
How did these
‘Midgaard’ come by their longevity?
His voice held a dangerous edge to it.
Did
they board one of our ships and experiment on our people?

“You walked among us in your youth,” Tommy said cautiously.
“Isn’t it possible that some crew from the ship watching over Midgaard may have
done the same?”

True,
he mused.
They may have been seized on the
surface.

“I think he means that some of the crew may have done the
dance with no pants,” Kale offered.

“I was leading up to that, but, yes – it’s possible, isn’t
it?”

None of that was permitted here, but it is possible that
some of the female crew might have mated with Midgaard and passed on their
cellular structures. It would have taken more than one female, though, for a
widespread change in the entire population. Perhaps they were attempting to
replenish a dwindling population aboard the vessel.

“Perhaps we’ll learn something if we go there.” Tommy forced
himself to take a deep breath. “So, you’re content to let Earth continue along,
then?”

What do you mean?

“You, umm… You’re not going to wipe us out and start over?”

What? Do you have any idea how long it took for your
species to show any promise at all? I swear, one of my own ancestors recorded
the opinion that pointy sticks might end up being the high-water-mark of your
civilization. It was even a relief when you figured out that sharp rocks worked
better. You think I want to go through all that again? No. Just sort yourselves
out before I have to defrost one of my successors and go to my own rest.

Lychensee, Weirfall

H
arry
stood just inside the entrance to the meeting hall, looking up at the soaring,
glass-enclosed space. They were roughly two hundred floors above ground level
and the top floor of the building was half forest, half amphitheater. Above
them, the glass enclosure soared for at least another thirty stories. He had
seen many such enclosures as his shuttle descended into the planet’s capital
and had noticed how they all interconnected.

Birds, or what passed for them on this world, soared above,
some diving for fish in a lake in the north-east corner. Even the lakes were
interconnected by rivers that ran through the myriad of skywalks. The entire
thing was a completely self-contained, self-sustaining ecosystem, and others
like it existed in every major city on the planet. Over half of them had been
joined as the cities grew into each other’s boundaries.

The wildlife of Weirfall still thrived, but it had been
urbanized.

“Come to watch your friend’s disgrace?” A sour voice pulled
Harry’s gaze back down to reveal a tall, thin Midgaard who stared at him with
obvious distaste. “Only a Human would be so crass as to compound a warrior’s
shame by witnessing it. You should have the decency to let him disappear
quietly.”

“I was of the impression that his fate has not yet been
decided,” Harry answered mildly.

“The Norns are severing his skein even now. The words to
come,” he said, waving a negligent hand toward the hollow of the amphitheater behind
Harry, “are already spoken; it is just a matter of our lips catching up with
them.” He rested a hand on the hilt of his dagger. “You would do well to keep
your own lips away from those words, Human. Valdemar is not to be trifled
with.”

No,
thought Harry,
you are to be ignored, if
anything. This one is nothing more than a mannequin of charo husks, good at
frightening the avians away from the crops.
He looked through the posturing
fool as he examined his last thoughts.
I’m still using Orontes’ memories,
he
realized.
It was the knife that triggered it, I’ll bet. I fell back on
memories that fit the situation.
“If I meet this ‘Valdemar’, I shall be
sure to act accordingly.”

A look of angry frustration suffused Valdemar’s features.
“No, you fool! I am…”

“Ahh! The ‘Butcher of Presh’,” a loud voice proclaimed in
Midgaard.

Harry turned to see Odin striding toward him, several
captains following behind. Odin was Caul’s father and had spent the last
twenty-five centuries marooned on Earth. It had been a difficult situation to
resolve, since his son now led the huge war band of Midgaard warriors and could
not be expected to give up a hard-won command to his father. The answer had
been to name Odin the Lawgiver and so, here he was, ready to sit in judgement
at the Althing. It was a position of lesser power than Caul’s, but it was still
one of great honor.

Odin was the sort of leader that made a person feel as
though they were the focus of the moment. If he spoke to a man, he turned the
full force of his attention and charm on him. He was a brilliant tactician and
he used his skill to great effect, even in a simple conversation. He had a
knack for identifying common ground and he could maneuver on that ground as
effectively as on a real battlefield.

“Allfather,” Harry greeted him with an insolent grin.

Odin laughed. “Haven’t been called that in centuries,” he
clapped Harry on the shoulder. “You know, a human writer that I used to know
actually wrote about me shacking up with a girl in Islington. Good bit of
comedy, that, and closer to the real story than his readers ever knew.”

“I’ve read that story,” Harry blurted in surprise. “I even
thought about it when we first heard that you’d been living among us all this
time. Wouldn’t it be difficult, a relationship with someone who only lives a
fraction of your own lifespan?”

“You ever spend five thousand years married to the same
woman?” Odin raised an eyebrow. “The honeymoon wears off after a couple of
centuries and you end up with an uneasy alliance. Freya tried to kill me at
least three times before I left Midgaard for the ‘raid that never ended’. It
was her ferocity in a fight that drew me to her in the first place.” He
chuckled. “Speaking of ferocity, how did you learn to fight like that?”

“Lothbrok talks too much,” Harry said, waving a dismissive
hand.

“Lothbrok?” Odin face showed surprise. “Haven’t you seen?
The Oaxians were broadcasting the fight to every planet in the Republic until
the Dactari deployed a worm to kill the data. I’ve seen it with my own eye. You
started with no weapon, and in the space of two minutes you put down three
armed opponents. It was one of the most brutal things I’ve ever seen and I was
part of the invasion of Britain, after the Romans left. My people have a name
for that kind of fighting – Bezerkier.”

 Harry had noticed, during Odin’s description of the
fight, that Valdemar had taken his hand away from his hilt. He was struggling
to keep the fear from showing on his face. He kept looking to the passing
crowds as though seeking a pretext to excuse himself, but the crowds were
thinning as the amphitheater filled up.

The microclimate atop this building reminded Harry of
Norway.
Is the climate of Midgaard like this? Maybe that’s why Odin settled
in Northern Europe…

A light rain began to fall from the condenser plates,
pattering softly onto the leaf mould on either side of the wide path. An
automated awning began to unfold above the tiers of seats.

“Time to get started. We have a busy docket today,” Odin
announced, nodding to Harry before heading for the central stair that would
lead him down to the large dais.

Court was in session.

 Harry soon found that the matter of his friend’s
demotion was far from the top of the agenda and he spent several hours
researching the protocols and traditions of this gathering. He already had a
decent understanding from the Midgaard who had donated his memories to the
network of training pods. The main purpose had been the training of fleet
personnel to speak the Midgaard language, but the cultural knowledge went along
way toward helping the Humans get along with their allies.

By the time Lothbrok’s case came up, the rain had ended and
the awning had dried and folded itself, bathing the assembly in the
late-afternoon sun. Harry had been surprised to realize that his friend was
already standing in a circle before the dais as Valdemar spoke.

“It is a simple matter,” he declared, his voice dripping
with sarcasm. “Lothbrok has nine ships. He has failed in the most basic duty of
any hauld – to maintain ten ships of sufficient crew and armament. I move that
his title and fief be stripped from him and handed over to someone who can
properly manage it, small though it may be.” He nodded at a captain in the
front row as he headed for his seat. One of Valdemar’s junior haulds would take
the next shot in this battle.

The captain rose, quickly taking Valdemar’s place before
anyone else could claim it. “I move that Beringsburg be added to Valdemar’s
holdings,” he began. “He knows how to squeeze a profit from his people and you
will not be…”

“We have not yet ruled on the matter of Lothbrok’s status,”
Odin cut him off harshly. “That must happen before you can pick his bones. You
forfeit your words. Sit down, but know this,” he pointed a finger at the
surprised captain. “You’ll be called back to the circle before these
proceedings are done.”

As the hapless man returned to his seat, Odin glared around
the assembly. “Will anyone speak for the accused?”

One man, the most senior of Lothbrok’s nine captains, rose
to attest to the honor and cunning of their lord. He asserted that it was only
a matter of time before they seized a suitable ship from the enemy, but it
would have no bearing on the judgement, Harry knew. Odin was the Lawgiver, but
even he was constrained by the letter of the written codes. The challenge was
happening now and, though Lothbrok could almost certainly make up his numbers
if given time, he
currently
had only nine ships at his disposal. The
captain nodded sadly to Lothbrok before returning to his seat.

Harry stood.

He had chosen a seat near the front so that he could take
the speaker’s place before any protest had a chance to stop him. He reached the
spot amid a flurry of speculation and shouted outrage. Liev Bliekr had been
killed years ago for his perfidy, but his faction still lived on and they
wanted no outside interference in this attempt to seize more power for
themselves.

Valdemar had been sitting in the front row and he jumped up,
forgetting his earlier fear in the heat of the moment. He stalked over to stand
between Harry and Odin. “This alien has no place here,” he declared forcefully.
A storm of argument raged through the stands, growing silent as Odin stood and
looked down at Harry.

“What do you say to that, Human?”

It seemed a harmless enough question to an outsider, but
Harry knew it for the invitation it truly was. Odin’s seven words gave Harry
the opportunity to force his words into the record. The next step was simple,
but potentially dangerous.

He turned to Valdemar who was struggling to control his
features, now that he understood the legal position he had walked into. His
eyes began to show triumph as the Human captain unbuckled his gun belt and
dropped it to the floor.

That look quickly faded.

“I am ready,” Harry formally declared, “to defend the truth
of my words, Valdemar.” In naming Valdemar, he removed the possibility of his
opponent naming a proxy. Valdemar would have to risk his own neck. The Human
held his empty hands out. “I will not have it said that I employed unfair
weapons and so I will defend my rights with my hands alone, against your
blade,” he said with a mischievous grin, “and with it.”

A murmur of approval ran through the assembly. Loyalty and
bravery were highly regarded in their culture and they were seeing both as this
interloper offered to risk his blood for a friend.

“Does your objection still stand, Valdemar?” Odin demanded.

Valdemar knew he had a strong case and so he waved a
dismissive hand as he turned back to the stands. “There is little point in
wasting time on this, but I see no harm in letting him speak.”

Harry began before any further interruptions could be
mounted. “A good friend once told me that a hauld must understand economics,”
he spoke loudly, projecting his voice to the back rows. He saw barely
perceptible nods, but most were now listening closely. This was the first time
a Human had taken the speaker’s circle.

“To master economics, one must first come to grips with
basic mathematics. That man,” he pointed to Valdemar, “says that Lothbrok has
only nine ships. I say he is mistaken.”

Valdemar was instantly back on his feet. “This is a foolish
waste of our time,” he shouted to Odin. “The lie is easily proven. Lothbrok’s
captains sit there,” he stabbed a finger at the pitifully small group. “There
are nine of them and, through them, there are only nine ships at his command.”

“It is no lie,” Harry said simply. “Do you challenge the
truth of my words?”

“There is no need to challenge your words, when clear
evidence exists,” Valdemar snarled, coming to stand in front of his Human
adversary. “We all have eyes, and there are only nine captains.”

“I am the tenth,” Harry replied calmly. “And if you continue
to call me a liar, you had better be willing to back it up.”

That was all it took. Odin had trouble bringing the
proceedings back to order. Almost everyone had come to their feet, shouting
their approval. Harry had observed the forms of the proceedings and he had
shown both loyalty and bravery. The personal sacrifice of offering his own
service to save his friend was the sort of thing that ignited their fierce
pride and they loved him for it.

“Silence!” Odin’s staff captain slammed the butt end of a
heavy mace against the granite of the dais with a great, thunderous boom. The
noise of the crowd finally faded.

Odin raised his voice. “The proceedings against the Lord of
Beringsburg are dismissed.” He waited while the fresh roar of approval died
down and then he pointed into the crowd. “Ivar, you are recalled.”

Darting a glance at Valdemar, the nervous captain came
toward the dais. Odin waved him to the defendant’s circle and the crowd hushed
in anticipation. Today’s Althing was turning out to be a good show.

“Ivar,” he boomed. “In the full view and hearing of this
assembly, you attempted to dispose of a man’s possessions while they were still
his. You stand accused of theft.” He turned to the assembly. “Will anyone here
speak for him?”

Harry looked over to where Valdemar sat with his faction. A
handful of his captains looked to their leader but saw no indication that he
wanted anyone to speak.

“Very well,” Odin carried on. “You must pay reparations to
your intended victim. The customary penalty is one tenth of your goods. He
paused for a moment as he examined a retinal projection of fleet strengths. “
Bakesuden
is a good representation of your average vessel. Lothbrok, do you accept
this ship as compensation?”

“I do, sire.” No longer a defendant, Lothbrok was allowed to
speak for himself.

“But that leaves me with…” Ivar trailed off, realizing the
foolishness of his outburst.

“With only nine ships?” Odin replied. “Then you had best
hope that you haven’t made any enemies recently.”

A chorus of chuckles. The errant fool was an archetype of
Midgaard stories.

Lothbrok was still on the floor. No longer a defendant, he
had stopped halfway back to his seat, and he saw the chance that was being
proffered by his master’s father. “Sire, I wish to advise the court that the
hauld known as Ivar Loose-Tongue no longer has the ability to field the
necessary ten ships and has therefore failed in his obligations as a noble
leader.”