Authors: Bennett R. Coles
That he had not expected. “What,
the
Canterbury?”
“Mm-hmm. I was accepted on scholarship for the first year.”
“In what? Acting? Painting?”
“Opera.”
“Shut up!”
Her smile broadened. “It’s true. I was a coloratura soprano. I was planning on doing my thesis performance as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s
Magic Flute
.”
Jack sat back, stunned. He stared at this woman in front of him, dressed in blue pajamas leaning up in her hospital bed. He tried to push out his memories of her black, armored spacesuit and imagine her as an opera singer with a huge curly wig and a poufy dress.
“I can see it,” he lied politely.
“Well, my father couldn’t. He had some pretty clear ideas about what his children were allowed to grow up to be. My older brother is a teacher, so no shortage of prestige there. My younger brother always wanted to go Army, so there were no worries there either. But a daughter in a fine arts school? Utterly unacceptable.”
Jack was surprised that she had two siblings—it must have been one of the privileges accorded a veteran.
“He wasn’t happy with two out of three?”
“There’s four of us, actually. My younger brother and sister are twins.”
“Four, wow. But why didn’t you stick with opera?”
“There I was, nineteen years old, being told by my father that I was throwing away my life. I couldn’t live with that, so I left Canterbury and joined up just to try and please him. But like I said, there was no way I was ever going to be under him again, so I went Astral Force, and went officer.”
“And here we are,” he said.
A sharp, nasty laugh escaped her lips, followed by a wry smile. “I don’t know whether it’s the happy drugs,” she said, “or just that I’ve had a lot of time to think these past few days. But I don’t really talk about this much—so keep your mouth shut, Subbie.” Her expression robbed the words of any real malice.
He grinned. “Just so long as you don’t tell anyone how I peed myself when you pointed your gun at me over Laika.”
Her laugh came easily again and she relaxed visibly.
“Deal. Now I’m probably keeping you from somewhere. Thanks for chatting with me.”
He stood and collected his chair. “Any time. How long till you go back to your troops?”
“Actually, I’m going back to
Rapier
. Looks like we’re flying again.”
Jack smiled at his own little secret. “Well, take care, ma’am. I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”
J
ack regretted leaving the AG environment of sickbay, but hadn’t lost his space legs, so he found his way quickly up to the main hangar. There were still two long lines of strike fighters parked facing outward, ready to deploy. But crowded in were at least three-dozen star fighters, orphaned after the carrier
Artemis
was destroyed by Orbital Platform Two, before the final torpedo attack could be launched.
It had been a devastating blow to the EF’s security, and he wondered how many other star fighters had found sanctuary in
Jutland
or the other two invasion ships.
No, wait
—just the other
one
invasion ship.
Quebec
had never left Abeona orbit.
The EF was hurting, and as Jack made his way to the far end of the hangar he saw no more obvious evidence of this than his new plane.
Rapier
was certainly looking better than the last time he’d seen her—both wings were straight, and there were no gaping holes in the hull—but up close he could see the patch-jobs down her once-smooth surface. The port engine was a slightly different color than the rest of the ship, and still had equipment and scaffolding littered around it. Both strike pods were missing, he noticed with sudden relief—he could still remember the hellish ride aboard one of them up from Free Lhasa, and really didn’t need another reminder of that day.
“She’s coming together,” a voice behind him said, “despite her looks.” He turned and saw Lieutenant Commander Kane floating toward him.
“Sir, Jack Mallory reporting for duty. I’m your new pilot.”
Thomas slowed his movement by brushing one hand against
Rapier
’s fuselage. He extended his other hand.
“Good to have you aboard, Jack. Lieutenant Duncan tells me you’re a hell of a pilot.”
Jack shook his hand and grinned. Had the XO really said that?
“I think he just wants to get me away from Hawks because I keep breaking them.”
“You’re trained in ASW, aren’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Good. Because
Rapier
’s getting kitted out with the ASW detection gear
Kristiansand
salvaged from your Hawk.” He tapped the turret slung under the fuselage. “With these babies we can take on enemy fighters, with our morningstars we can take out enemy ships, and now with your gear and expertise, we can hunt stealths. We’re our own little battleship, Jack.”
“Cool.” Jack was pleased to hear about the ASW gear. It was good to bring something familiar with him. “When’s our first mission, sir?”
Kane ran a hand along the patched fuselage. “Day after tomorrow, probably. Still a few things to fix on board, and we need our OpsO to heal a bit more.”
“Man, in two days we’ll be halfway to the jump gate.”
“We’re not going to the jump gate.”
“What? I thought the plan was to hit Abeona, and then tear off for home.”
Kane frowned slightly. “I guess you haven’t read today’s tactical brief. Yesterday a Centauri squadron jumped through from Terra. This is good news for Terra, because we’ve forced the enemy to pull back some of its ships from the front line. But it’s bad news for us. They’re sitting at the jump gate, waiting for us, and we don’t have the strength to take them on. It’s just like Sirius, only now the EF is even weaker.”
Jack didn’t like where this conversation was going. “So, what’s the plan?”
“There are over a thousand human settlements in Centauria, scattered over the worlds. Most of them don’t have any defenses at all. Our mission is to destroy as many of them as possible, to force the Centauri government to surrender, or at least withdraw from Terra.”
Now Jack
really
didn’t like what he was hearing.
“We’re going to slaughter civilians…?”
Sadness flashed in Kane’s eyes. “Subbie, we’re at war. We’re trapped behind enemy lines and for all we know the Centauris have already invaded Earth. Not just Terra—Earth. All we can do from here is make bloody trouble for our enemies, and if that means killing civilians, then yes, that’s what we’re going to do.”
Jack knew better than to argue. This was exactly why he didn’t make a habit of reading the tactical briefs posted in the wardroom. Don’t look for what you don’t want to know.
Better to focus on what he could influence. “Sir, I know we’re outgunned these days, and I’ve been thinking about some of the things that went down at Abeona. Sometime when you have a few minutes, I’d like to bounce some ideas off you about the use of torpedoes against brane targets, based on our engagements with the orbital platforms.”
Kane stared at him strangely. Jack felt compelled to explain more.
“It has to do with the behavior of gravitons farther in than sixteen peets. Pretty technical stuff, but if you’re interested…”
To his surprise, Kane looked very interested indeed. “I’ve given those orbital platforms a lot of thought myself lately. Tell me what you got.”
On his hand-held display, Jack brought up the consolidated tactical log from the Battle of Abeona and ran the sequence showing the massed Hawk attack on Orbital Platform One.
“The mass torpedo attack worked, but it took hundreds of weapons to pound the target because their graviton pulses are weaker here on the brane, and couldn’t do enough damage. Enough to destroy a single ship, for sure, but not a structure as massive as an orbital platform. To really get gravity working for us, we need to go deeper into the Bulk.”
“Sure,” Kane said, nodding. “The farther into the Bulk we go, the bigger a boom we get. But if the target’s on the brane, what good does it do us?”
Jack forwarded the log to the point where his Hawk was ejected from
Protector
.
“I fired a torpedo at Platform Two, but I set it to implode at sixteen peets—as far into the Bulk as our weapons go. The implosion was significant enough to shake up the platform—notice here that it actually stopped firing for a few seconds—but effectively the shot didn’t work. Like you say, it was just way too far into the Bulk for the gravitons to grab a target on the brane. But something weird did happen.”
He moved aside the tactical log and brought up the hunt control recording from his Hawk. He replayed his torpedo shot and watched as the gravimetric landscape sagged under the implosion, going deep purple, almost black. He paused the recording and pointed at one of the graphs next to the main display. There was a spike at the exact moment of detonation.
“Just for a microsecond, there was a noticeable buildup of dark energy, totally focused on the point of the implosion.”
He paused expectantly. Kane stared back blankly.
“Okay, Jack, so there was dark energy. So?”
He quickly brought up some sketches he’d made, as well as some more polished diagrams he’d downloaded from some archived articles he’d dug up.
“So… dark energy doesn’t just hang around in pockets. It doesn’t even usually exist in a way that we can detect it. We manufacture it to hold the jump gates open, but otherwise you don’t see it in nature. Except—” He pointed at his sketches. “—when you get below the Erebos Layer, sixteen peets or so into the Bulk. What I think we’re looking at here is a tenebral implosion.”
Kane didn’t seem to be sharing his excitement. Jack’s confidence began to fade and he dropped his gaze to study the sketches again. The diagrams he’d pulled from TacNotes were a lot prettier, and it suddenly occurred to him that he probably wasn’t the first person to think of this.
“Jack,” Kane said, “I’m not really following you, but I’m not a dimensional physicist. Let me ask you this—are you saying that you have a way to use our existing weapons more effectively?”
His excitement started to rise again. “With a modification to the way the gravitons are pulsed, yes.”
“Then let’s go to my cabin and write this down. The EF needs all the help it can get.”
T
homas watched as the lower airlock doors opened in the deckhead of
Normandy
’s hangar, welcoming his little ship once again.
Rapier
’s new bridge windows were so clear in comparison to the buckled, blackened windows they’d replaced that he almost thought them invisible. Like everything new aboard the fast-attack craft, they only highlighted further the battered disrepair of the ship in general. Much as he enjoyed being in command again, Thomas secretly questioned the wisdom of sending
Rapier
into space.
Not that he would dare mention it, of course. Chandler had somehow convinced himself that Thomas was a coward and a skulker—if
Rapier
had not flown this mission, no doubt Chandler would have found her a new captain.
He shifted in his spacesuit and glanced over at the damage control board displayed on Katja’s console to his left. There were far too many red and yellow lights for his comfort, even though he knew none of them indicated critical failures.
The lights of the hangar disappeared as
Rapier
was raised up into the airlock. In the sudden darkness Thomas became acutely aware of the silence that hung over the bridge. Jack would be concentrating on his controls—other than a quick test flight yesterday, this was his first time at the helm.
When they’d boarded, Katja had offered little more than a polite nod, and her flash-up reports had been brief and unadorned. Breeze had come on board wearing a scowl, speaking only when spoken to. The only life Thomas had seen in either woman had been when Jack had arrived.
Apparently no woman could resist a pilot’s charm.
To be fair, Jack was smarter than Thomas had given him credit for. He’d certainly mastered
Rapier
’s controls well enough, and their discussion about modified graviton pulses had strained Thomas’s knowledge of extra-dimensional physics. When he drafted his memo on the subject, he’d even called Jack to clarify a few points.
The upper airlock doors opened, and
Rapier
rose up into open space.
Normandy
’s vast topside came into view, large enough to give the illusion of a horizon under a brilliant canopy of stars. The EF was high above the Centauri ecliptic, nearly halfway between the two suns, and the naked stars shone brightly.
Thomas stole a glance at the constellation Cassiopeia, trying to locate the bright star known as Sol only four light years away. He didn’t spot it before Jack received clearance from
Normandy
and lifted off.
The big invasion ship fell out of view and Thomas watched idly as Jack cleared to open space to conduct a few routine maneuvers. The ship didn’t roll as smoothly as once she had, but he couldn’t tell if that was due to the damage or the young pilot. Chief Tamma had flown
Rapier
like an extension of his own body, but Tamma had also been a star fighter pilot by trade. And he had died over Abeona.
Jack had certainly proven that he could fly a plane like he’d stolen it, and Thomas reminded himself that the only way his little ship could function was if he trusted his officers and crew.
“Ship checks out,” Jack said. “Where to, skipper?”
Thomas highlighted
Rapier
’s patrol box on his 3-D display and forwarded the update to Jack, clamping down sudden irritation. Chief Tamma wouldn’t have needed to ask that question.
“Our mission today is combined picket,” he said, suddenly feeling the need to make sure all his officers had their heads in the game. “We know the Centauris have had at least one stealth ship in the area. Once in our patrol box, we’ll conduct sprint-and-drift ASW trawling while looking outward for enemy vessels, as well. Pilot is responsible for ASW, Navigator for AAW, and OpsO for AVW. Questions?”