A
Freighter Named Dreadnaught
By Jim King Neural link established. Download of memory core commencing. Chapter One Ember starport. Section three (Downport, cheap hotels and slums). The Spacers Rest (Tavern, brothel, gambling house. Place of ill repute). Ground floor bar (casual drunks, private booths, no food in the bar). A private booth 27:19 Local time. Tuesday. The Spacers Rest saw a lot of traffic, it was the closest watering hole to the Downport, a lot of spacers wanted as much play time and as little walking as possible so they got this far and no further. Every form of alcohol known to Terra and a bunch from off world. Whores to suit any tastes, five different species, gene mods and all four active sexes. Gambling on anything that was legal and a fair amount that wasn’t. Dancing, music, every form of entertainment drugs, Senso-Feelies, Sims. Oh and fairly decent food upstairs. The suit that walked in the main door didn’t fit. For one thing it was a suit, proper groundside business suit. Running to about 10 Kilocreds which was more than most in here would spend on clothing their entire lives. The Terran male inside the suit didn’t fit either. Spacers don’t need to keep their hair short unless they spend a lot of time in micro gee or in vacc suits but only the military went for that buzz cut style, flat on top and stubble on the sides. Grade A jarhead cut. Young, maybe in his thirties, barely old enough to have started rejuv yet. The way his eyes swept the room, the way he stood all balanced and alert. He looked like a hard case, half the spacers in the room took a good look and told themselves they could take him. They probably couldn’t but a man who struts into a spacer bar like he is there to kick arse and take names is asking for a fight. Of course the owners of the Spacers Rest knew that which is why the furniture was either welded to the floor or flimsy and the glasses and bottles were all thin plas. A few of the half drunk spacers were just about deciding to stand up and kick off said fight when the suit and the jarhead inside turned toward the booths along the walls and walked up to one. The suit and jarhead stopped by a booth and looked down at the spacer sprawled across the bench seat inside. “I’m looking for a Captain Welut, Kinja Welut. Would that be you?” Never heard of him. He flicked his fingers across a virtual keyboard and sent a message. My comm unit binged. “Captain Welut.” Do I owe you money? Did I bed your wife, girlfriend, mistress or daughter? “Captain I understand you are master of a rather unusual freighter, the Dreadnaught.” That I am son, that I am. You looking to hire my ship? “My, Comand..... That is my boss would like to meet you. He has need of an unusual ship.” Well if he pays damn well I can be as unusual as he wants, what’s the run, what cargo? What sort of trouble am I likely to run into? “That will be covered at the meeting captain.” Well I’ll check my business schedule, I’m a bit busy but I could probably do something tomorrow. Any time after 15:00 would be fine and your boss can spring for lunch. A decent lunch mind, real cooked food not that synth crap. “Tomorrow at 15:00 should be fine. Here is the address.” My comm pinged again. “If you don’t mind me asking captain. You have a certain reputation, your ship does as well. I have never heard of a freighter captain who was a Link and the spec on your ship is frankly bizarre.” You missed the war I guess. Too young? The suit and the jarhead inside nodded. Well son it was like this. # The war was going badly, very badly. Colony worlds under siege or overrun, trade outside of the first colonies or Terran system was down 75% or more. The enemy were everywhere. They had thousands of fighters. They jumped into a system, launched fighters then the carriers hid while the fighters swept the system and took out anything they could find. They had big stuff but didn’t use it much at first, just to take down a few of the weaker colonies. We were getting hammered and no question. So we started trying everything, every weird and wonderful project, the scientists dug out old research and took another look at it, could it help, could it win the war. That’s where the Link project came from. Decades ago they could never get it to work, then with the war and better tech they managed it. Take people with an ultra precise genetic structure, clone brain tissue and use it to grow a neural net of bio computers. Link the person and the network of computers together using quantum speed connections. Now use those bio computers to run drives, weapons, sensors, shields as what amounts to a single person and you have a fighter that has insanely fast response speeds, processing data at quantum computer speeds but with human intuition and thinking. The first things they built were the Interceptors, seriously fast, dedicated anti fighter platforms, small, good sensors and shields. They ran rings around the enemy fighters and suddenly the whole war changed. Instead of us huddling around defences while the enemy fighters roamed at will now they had to withdraw their raiding groups or send them in with destroyers to protect them from our Link Interceptors. Now we had them restricted to moving with slower warships. The fast raider groups that could sweep all over a system were a thing of the past. But the interceptors couldn’t hurt the destroyers so the raider packs were still a threat, just a slower bigger one. It took more than a year to sort out the problems with Linking two people together, they kept arguing and trying to take control. But they did it, don’t ask me how, I wasn’t involved in that one. But with two people Linked we had heavy fighters that could go after the destroyers. So we could go in and take out the destroyers with our heavies while the interceptors were then free to hunt down the enemy fighters. That was when they rolled in with cruisers and heavy stuff, battleships and the like. We had warships but going toe to toe with them was costly, no one knew how many they had or why they had been reluctant to use them up till then. Some smart arse said they had a limited number because they used them very rarely, they must be risk adverse. Yea right. Then they took the colony at Timberfall and cut off a dozen colonies and systems. It was a choke point, a key world and well defended. A battleship, cruisers, carriers, destroyers, fixed defences, missile pods, fighter wings. We had the lot defending that world. I don’t know what the poor bastards defending that system were thinking when over a hundred enemy ships jumped in including 20 carriers and 7 battleships. Probably oh shit why did I volunteer for this crap? So anyway we had Link interceptors and heavy fighters and we had forced them to deploy big battle groups that we couldn’t handle. Next step was bigger Link crews now they had fixed the multiple personality problems, along with a massive systems wide gene testing program for thousands more compatible people, that’s where I was drafted. Gunships, anywhere from 8 to 12 crew, about the size of a corvette but way faster and more agile. Some anti fighter weapons but mostly strong front shields and either anti ship torpedoes or primary beams. In groups of four anything smaller than a battle ship was toast, they could coordinate a strike onto a single point of a target and burn through a cruisers shields and gut it in seconds. Very scary. After that it was us roaming all over the place and them moving around in big fleets centred on Battleships since the only thing that could hurt one of them was another battleship and we didn’t have a lot of them. So back to the research and build new weapons and new ships including the Link Strike cruisers with 20 or more Link crew and a really very scary spinal mount primary weapon called the Ultima cannon. Battleships opened like tins cans. It was about the same time that some bright spark came in with another project from somewhere, the Procyon Drive. A really stupid idea but it was war and everything was being tried. The Procyon drive would be a huge advantage, a war winner they said. Problem was while they could get it to work no one could navigate it, it went randomly because no computer could handle the weird way it worked and no human was able to control it directly. It moved the ship entirely into subspace, not like the warp drives that play with space time in real space, this thing went multi dimensional. No way to control it. That was when someone on the one project talked to someone on the other project and had an idea, why not try using a Link navigators. That’s where I got involved in the crazy drive. # Billions gene tested, tens of thousands of people found to be suitable for the Link. Each subject to an exhaustive battery of testing and evaluation. Physical and mental capacity, skills, experience, reactions and more. They tested the lot. The ultra high reaction speed types with excellent piloting and gunnery skills went to the Interceptors. The Heavy fighters got the best combat capable two person Links. The gunships got a mix of abilities and skills. Me, I was in the bottom 5% for piloting, the bottom 10% for gunnery, the top 10% for engineering and science and the top 1% for navigation and theories. I also scored in the bottom 2% for discipline, organisation and attitude to orders. I was listed as unsuitable for military service, go figure. Which is how I ended up working with the research teams building first the Gunships, then the strike cruisers. So when they came along looking for some dumb fools to be sent to the Procyon project they got me in the team They ran simulations and everything was fine. Then they decided to build a Procyon drive, they ran the numbers and decided to make it work properly it had to be big, battleship big. They built one drive, they took the aft section from a partially build battleship which had its power array and sub light thrusters. Then they stuck a compartment on the front to hold the bridge and crew spaces. It was a big ugly thing, the battleship frame had no outer hull or armour, it was just girders and structural beams with this huge globe of the drive in the middle and a cluster of power rooms and corridors around it. The crew section was from a battle damaged cruiser that was written off as too expensive to repair. A real mess of a ship. Which incidentally is why my freighter is called Dreadnaught, they took the name of the partially built battleship. Fleet could get nasty and force a name change but then they would give the name to some cruiser or destroyer and people would laugh so I still have the name. Dreadnaught, the toughest cargo scow in known space. Anyway they pulled in a flight team from one of the new strike cruisers and set them in place then started running tests on the drive. They could power it up fine, move it around sub light, it had a fair turn of speed being half a battleship and with no armour the sub lights could throw it around like a cruiser. But they couldn’t make it jump. The crew navigator said it was like trying to shape sloppy custard into three dimensional shapes. They got in a load of experts, tried some of the best military navigators, focus groups, theoretical studies, the lot. They concluded that the process of navigation required a significant comprehension of chaotic theory and a mental state that was inherently dissimilar to that required for military discipline and order. So basically me. When I joined the program they had cloned a whole batch of bio computers for my Link as they took time to grow. It was only after they had started the batch that they decided I wasn’t fit for military service. So I already had my personal Link network, they connected all of me to the test ship and plugged me in. The strike Cruiser crew went back to training and I got to command Dreadnaught for the very first time. We got everything ready, fully fuelled and supplied. A bunch of tech types, some scientists and some engineers plus a shed load of maintenance and support drones. Then I tried to create a navigation plot. That was insane, sub space is just crazy, it’s not three dimensions, it’s not four dimensions, it’s something like five or six but it’s hard to explain. Sub space is the underlying quantum energy state of the verse, it’s connected to everything at once, distances become odd because something is next to you and a thousand light years away at the same time. Go back a century to when people were still trying to crack Unified Field theory, it wasn’t until they discovered that the four forces Gravity, magnetism and the weak and strong atomic bindings were in fact the shadows of the real energy field which was in subspace that they started getting anywhere. But once we started to understand what subspace was and what the unified force was we got all sorts of new stuff like Fusion and artificial gravity and the like. Anyway subspace and the Procyon drive. It’s just about impossible to do anything under about ten light years, it’s too close to see so you need to jump some distance away and then jump back. It’s like trying to make a geodesic globe out of limp noodles in your mind where you can only see one side of the globe and if it gets too close your body blocks out the view of the half sphere you can see. Like I said, it’s weird. Anyway I plotted a jump and off we went. Somewhere. Not where I was aiming for, about 800 light years off in fact. I did say it was like building complex structures out of wet noodles right. So the crew tried to work out where we were in real space while I tried to work out how my navigating had got us there and how to get home. It took a week and a total of five jumps to get back to base. After that it got a lot easier, I could navigate a jump to within a few thousand kilometres of target at just over 1000 light years. Despite the fact that the drive was basically unlimited range it didn’t have enough power to go further but this was thirty years ago, that didn’t matter since back then known space was 200 light years in radius. They worked on the tech and built several smaller drives for the new strike cruisers which involved a rebuild and put them back a year, in the mean time the hulk was given a makeover. Essentially they took off the cruiser bit then found the front 75% of an old titan class freighter and welded it to the front of the ship and added a proper military hull and a shed load of docking clamps and other stuff on the battleship rear end. So I spent over a year playing taxi. I could carry a pair of cruiser sized ships or four destroyer sized ships on the side clamps and another two destroyers or about a hundred fighters and other small craft in the cargo bays plus enough stores and supplies to keep the entire force going for months. I became a one man fleet taxi, somewhere was attacked and I could jump there in seconds. To keep the drive secret I jumped to the edge of the system and the ships ran in using warp. Intel said the enemy were going mad trying to work out how we were building so many ships and carriers, they thought we had three or four times as many ships as we really had because we always seemed to have carriers and warships close enough to respond to any attack within less than a day. They never did find out that it took that time for hyper comm messages to reach me and seconds for me to jump in. Probably won the war for us. Not that I got any bloody credit for it though. So we were winning the defence, now we needed to win the offence and win the damn war. The first pair of strike cruisers came on line with the Procyon drives. The navigators had a hell of a job, too uptight to understand what they were doing. So they ended up having civilian navigators, people like me, mad enough to navigate in sub space. They could jump about 400 light years, too small to carry enough reactors so they lacked the power to go further than that. Still they could cross known space in one go which meant they could attack on one front then jump and attack on the other front. By messing with IDs and call signs they were pretending to be a dozen ships. They were scary in combat, 26 Linked crew plus a load of normal’s to do the mundane stuff, they could take on three times their numbers or tonnage, win then run away to repair shields and stuff. By the last year of the war we had six of them in action and we built an insane strike group. I was taken off duty for a couple of months and underwent a serious refit. Proper hanger decks, launch tubes and all. The latest in reactors and military grade shield generators, enough power to expand my range to 1200 light years and run full battleship shielding. Enough weapons to stand off a cruiser or an entire wing of fighters. Plus they developed Gunship docking racks just for me. I became a super carrier and tender. 120 mixed Link fighters. 20 link Gunships and a dozen marine assault boats. We would jump in, I would launch the lot and six strike cruisers went in with a wave of fighters and gunships on both flanks. The marines cleaned up anything that survived. We captured a load of enemy ships that way. Then we withdrew leaving a burning colony behind us and off we went jumping hundreds of light years to hit another enemy colony or system on the other side of the war. We burned out every colony of theirs we could find. We had scores of recon ships just finding us targets. Only things we couldn’t hit were their core worlds, they had planetary and orbital defences , battleships, monitors and thousands of short range fighters. Still we turned the war around, cut off and took out all of their colonies and laid siege to their core worlds. Then the bloody politicians talked them into surrendering. Damn fool idea. They attacked us and a bunch of suits back on Terra decided to make nice and let them off. # Now we’re best friends with the bloody Orcs and giving them all sorts of technology. About the only thing still secret far as I know is how the Procyon drive works as and that’s because every example was destroyed after the war. They told the Orcs all about the drives after the peace was declared when they asked how many ships we actually had. A year after the war ended and those bloody fools told them our entire fleet strength, yes you tusk faced bastards, our real fleet strength is a third of what you thought it was. Oh and we got rid of the Procyon drives for some super secret reason so we can’t do that anymore. Please start the war again and beat us! They didn’t start the war again, now they just rob us blind through taxes and piracy. So anyway here I am; genuine hero and war winner. Fleet took out most of the hanger decks and launch tubes along with all gunship racks and all the heavy weapons. They gave me a standard warp drive instead so I trundle around like everyone else, one light year every three hours. The Link fighter squadrons, the gunships and the strike cruisers. Elite squadrons they call them now. Hell they have Tri D movies made about them. The fleet has been run down since the peace but the Links are still recruited and kept at full strength. You seen those recruitment adverts? ‘Do you have what it takes to be a Link, join up now and be tested? Your genes could make you one of the Elite.’ Elites, bollocks. I got a discharge and orders to never talk about what I knew or else. The bloody fighter types got to be shiny heroes and I got shit canned. Didn’t even get a pension because I was a civilian freighter pilot! All the fighting I saw and the whole Terran Confederation couldn’t afford to pay me a pension. Still I make a good living hauling high risk cargo. Since they scrapped the battleships and Battlecruisers I have the most powerful shields in known space, aside from a fleet battle station and there are only ten of those and they don’t move. So pirates, raiders, customs inspectors. I bounce the lot and laugh as I run past. That’s how I got to be here, a washed out Link pilot with a mongrel freighter. Anyway enough war stories, you said you were looking for a ship. Tell your boss I’ll come round for a visit tomorrow. Oh and remember to tell him, real food! Chapter Two Ember starport. Section one (Business section, starport administration, offices). Office block 17-24 (high security private building). Meeting location 409th floor, room 71 15:00 Local time. Wednesday. I turned up ten minutes early, what! Yea I know. Me and early. Hey they promised food, real food. I’m prepared to act respectable for a decent feed. The building was one of the 500 floor office blocks in the nice part of the starport town; security drones buzzing around overhead just to remind all the good little citizens that this is a nice neighbourhood so don’t cause trouble. The drone air car delivered me to the landing pad just outside, on the ground. This building didn’t have any mid level landing pads, in fact it was the only building in sight that wasn’t covered in the balconies that served as landing pads every twenty or so floors. Odd that, make all the visitors come in at the ground level. Very odd, you could even call it anti social. Anyhow, nice place. Uniformed flunky by the front door, artfully hidden security scanners behind the Venusians ferns either side of the reception desk which was a stable repulsor field. Just enough repel to form a solid surface but you could push through it with effort. Very expensive, very flash. Of course the field generators at either end were far too big, just about the right size to protect a military grade defence field across the entire back half of reception though. The drop down lumin globes were very nice too, retro and expensive. Not opaque enough though, with the daylight behind them you can just see the laser turret inside turning as it follows you. So far so good, given some of the people I have worked for over the years this level of security is fairly restrained. Some of my customers meet you at the door with mercs in power armour or armoured exo’s. Mind you, some of my customers need that sort of protection. Nothing here than any moderately wealthy multi system corporate wouldn’t have. So why was the skin on the back of my neck itching like I was about to jump into an ambush? # Why yes I am Captain Welut. You want to see some ID, what, didn’t your security scanners read my DNA, optic pattern, body thermal pattern and the rest yet. One of my better fake Ids hidden behind an easy to spot fake and the flunky didn’t even bother to mention it was fake! How am I supposed to maintain my reputation as a rogue and scoundrel if no one takes me seriously? Oh well. Hey grav compensation in the lift, 50 floors a second. Niiiiice. The lift got to the right floor and stopped, the door stayed shut. My Link told me it had detected a penetration attack on my personal comm unit and several hundred attacks on the background for the front end fake ID I used here. Social media, web sites, a history, even school records. These guys blew through the lot straight into the second fake ID behind. Here’s a tip for free, if you ever need to set up a good fake ID, put another fake ID in front of it. People are so happy they got past the first Fake and found the hidden one they never bother to check that the second ID is fake. Not these guys though, straight through the first AND the second and sniffing round for something real. This lot were either the fake front for a cyber terrorist ring, one of the top ten Ultracorps or they were official. No one else pulls this much shit. # Finally the door opened and I got to meet the greeting squad. Two in front, two more either side just far enough back to be out of direct sight. All wearing smart business suits, all with jarhead haircuts. All with blocked socials and IDs. Outside of the frontiers and the wilderness worlds everyone was flagged, you just looked at them and all their public details came up. Even my fake Ids had public flags. These guys, girls and nuets, blank. Anti social. “Captain Welut?” Damn, you got me. So which way is the food? “This way sir.” Flunky number one (dark brown fuzz) gestured across the wide and empty landing to a pair of doors. The only doors, odd use of space in such an expensive building. This is a kill zone! Oh good thought, glad I just had that though, make me happy why don’t you. That’s the problem with the Link. It’s me, all me, but I sort of end up thinking stuff in the different Bio computers so I’m never sure if I thought of something or if it was one of the me’s. Hey I have a digital certificate that says I am functionally sane! # The door in question led me to a very nice room with multiple doors leading away and a receptionist behind a genuine wood desk. Earth Oak by the look of it and probably five hundred years old. Bloody hell, the receptionist has a desk worth more than most aircars. This is either an Ultracorp or Official; no one else spends money like that. I looked at the receptionist, not bad in the looks but something odd. Human but something with the set of the shoulders, the shape of the neck. Genie for sure but not sure what type. So many gene mods these days if you had the money you could become something unique. Still not as harmless as she looked. Oh and she was blocked as well. She stood up and I got a look at the rest of her. Arms and legs just that bit too long, fingers short, something wrong with the nails. She looked like she was made of alloy cables under the skin. Some sort of combat mod then, tough, fast and probably cut armour with the talons. “Welcome Captain Welut. The Admiral is waiting for you.” She gestured and one of the doors clicked and smoothly slid sideways. I got a glimpse as it vanished into the frame. Two centis thick and probably some sort of armour. Beyond was a holo screen so I couldn’t see beyond the door. I rubbed the itch on the back of my neck and walked up to the door then jumped through the holoscreen. Hey make an entrance whenever you can, it may be your last. Both feet landed soundlessly onto a very thick carpet. Argosian Cathra fur by the look of it, these guys didn’t have any shortage of money to throw around. The carpet covered the whole room which was bigger than my entire quarters back on Dreadnaught. I made a note for one of me to remind me to jack my prices when we got down to that sort of thing. One huge desk, more Earth Oak. Several smaller chairs in front, off to one side a long oval conference table with eight plush chairs. Three people waiting. One behind the desk, human, male, well into his second rejuv or maybe just taken his third. The wrinkles round the eyes and on the hands gave him away. Plus the uniform. Two globe Admiral, fleet intelligence badges and a whole stack of salad. Been a while since I spent time around the fleet but I could still remember the bars and how to read them. If they were real this guy had seen almost as much action in the war as me. Would you believe he was blocked too. Two others. One Human sitting in one of the chairs in front of the desk. Human male, third rejuv or maybe fourth. Old either way. Pure gene but I could see the glint of neural jacks behind both ears and there was a slight square shape under the skin of his temples. Some serious cyber enhancements in this guy’s head. Older suit, worn elbows. Blocked, this lot had some serious problems with being sociable. The last figure was standing by the conference table, deliberately out of my line of sight, I had to turn to see them. That’s when the back of my neck really started itching. Female, five feet tall, broad shoulders, enough muscles to make me look puny. Broad face, thick eyebrows, course black hair. Double hinged jaw and a mouth full of tusks. An Orc. A fucking Orc! This deal just officially went to shit. I swung round and glared at the Admiral. No way he was paying enough for me to work with an Orc, or maybe she was one of his staff and nothing to do with the run. Either way my price just went up another step. Orcs. My day had been going nicely till now. # I walked over to the chairs by the desk and pulled one back a bit then plonked myself down, I stretched my legs out as far as they went and slouched as far into the cushioning as I could. So Commodore, what’s the job and when do we eat? The Admiral looked down his nose at me. The old guy glared. The Orc stood there, could have been snarling, could have been smiling. Who can tell with all those fangs and tusks. “Captain Welut, I find myself in need of your services for an urgent task. One which both you and your”, he paused as if trying to find a polite word, “your unusual ship are ideally suited.” Well as long as you’re paying the bills Commodore I’ll consider it, what’s the job anyway, cargo run, smuggling, you want me to run some contraband for you? The Admiral was controlling himself, at least the fact that he was trying to force his finger tips through the desk said he was working on it. The cyber head sitting across from me was turning a nice shade of angry red. The Orc, well who the hell cared what the Orc was doing but I glanced that way anyway. The Orc was sniggering. At least if it was human I would have said sniggering but with all those tusks and fangs who the hell can tell, she could have been snarling some sort of death threat at me. Well fuck them all, they want me, they pay and I’m not cheap. Bloody Fleet kicked me out like rubbish; they can pay through the nose to get me back. “We will, of course pay standard rates for the use of your ship captain, we want.” Just a damn minute sunshine. Standard rates, go have sex with your mother. I don’t work for standard rates, ever. You want me then I tell you the price, you can’t afford me then I walk. Standard rates, piss on that. “We are offering a generous success bonus on top, one that should satisfy even you Captain.” That’s your opinion commander, my services don’t come cheap, you want me you. “Five Megacreds.” Pay for me! Shit! This deal just got better and better. Five meg, even for me that’s stupid money. Way too much for a normal job. I don’t make that in a year. Crap, I’d even put up with an Orc for that sort of money. But if they are paying that much this must be a real dozy of a job. Something must have been showing on my face, the fleet brass had this sort of half smile on his face now. “Excellent, I knew that would get your attention. We want you to head to a system near here, collect a cargo and transport that cargo to a destination you will be given there. Exact details of the cargo and passengers will be made available when you reach the collection point. You will be paid standard rate for your entire cargo capacity for the trip to the collection point and to the destination. The bonus will be paid on safe arrival and delivery of cargo and passengers.” My link told me a set of coordinates had been sent to Dreadnaughts comm code. A nowhere system, eleven light years off, listed as uninhabited and worthless in the Fibbs guide. “I will meet you there in exactly 45 standard hours. Don’t be late.” Five megs, fuck me sideways. This must be dodgy, but hey it’s the fleet so it can’t be illegal now, can it? Probably some deep dark operation. Didn’t want to bring in some civilian or use a known fleet ship. Probably knew I could handle it and keep my mouth shut. Which I could and would. Five megs, I could buy a few nice items with that much cash. Done. So who am I doing business with then? “Introductions will be made when you arrive at the collection point, you may leave now.” Like I said, anti social. Suit yourself. As soon as the standard payment clears I’ll see you there. Nice doing business with you sunshine. I was half way to the door when I remembered the food. What, the thought of all that money was making everything else sort of fuzzy, it wasn’t my fault. I turned my head to look at the admiral. Hey, what about real food I was promised? # The food turned out to be a reservation at Guido’s in Sector 4 for two, the receptionist turned out to be Squad leader Estell Hasren and the gene mods and cyberware was the latest in Confed strike commando upgrades. She escorted me to the restaurant. Despite being a 110% Confed storm trooper she turned out to be surprisingly good company at lunch. Turned out she had enlisted for the Orc war and had fought all over the place. She had even been a passenger on Dreadnaught while I was playing taxi moving troops around. It’s a small verse after all. Oh and the food, out bloody standing. Not sure how Italian it was but it was real, well cooked and very tasty. Probably expensive as hell but I wasn’t paying so who cared. It’s not like the Fleet would have trouble paying the bill. She even escorted me back to the Downport terminal and arranged a personal shuttle for me. I managed to snag a comm code for her. Just in case I wanted to meet her again, you know, in case I wanted to hire her as security. Or some such. What! I find that whole good looking trained killing machine meme hot. # By the time I got back to Dreadnaught the standard payment had cleared. It was precisely itemised for hire of the ship for a two day run. Very precisely itemised. Exact cargo capacity, exact passenger capacity, they even included the shuttle bay capacity. The fact that they listed my exact cargo capacity was a bit worrying, they didn’t list my known capacity, they included every single smuggling space and hidden storage as well. How in the fiery pits had they found out about every single one of them? Bloody fleet Intel, pain in my arse even thirty years after they shit canned me. I guess I should tell you a bit about Dreadnaught now. I mentioned earlier how she came to be but there’s a lot more to her than just that. Nobody but me would ever call her beautiful but then I’m probably biased. Mostly people call her all sorts of insults as they bounce energy fire off her shields trying to stop us entering or leaving some area outside their jurisdiction. So 650 meters long in total plus maybe a few meters more if you count the sensor clusters and such like. The aft section is the battleship section. Roughly a cube, 200 meters a side but with the sharp edges planed down. The original battleship was a great slab sided monstrosity with thick armour sitting on the squared frame of structure but in my case it is a standard military hull, slightly curved. The forward section was 450 meters of an old Titan cargo hauler, slightly oval bulging out at the top and the middle. Along the bottom of the forward hull it was flat then the sides curved up and out to form the huge cargo bays. The titans had been hunch backed, the forward and middle section of the hull was 210 meters tall and 140 meters wide sloping down and in to 115 meters front and back. The nose was a flattish curve and further forward at the bottom. The original Titan bridge was still there perched just above the nose. I had another military command centre in the battleship section along with main engineering but with the Link I could command the ship from anywhere even outside her hull. The rear section was six decks but there was a lot of empty space, basically aside from the huge open area where the old Procyon Drive had been everything else was sitting on the main structural frames. Probably 45% of the volume was empty. Eight reactors in a cube set around where the Procyon had been, four on deck two and four on deck five. They formed the corners of the cube of corridors and rooms. Decks one and six led to a bunch of empty rooms and connected to the ventral and dorsal sub light manoeuvre drives. Decks three and four had been the lower and upper access levels of the Procyon, mostly they led nowhere now though some connected to the standard warp drive that Fleet had tucked in to that empty space. Just behind the join with the titan I had engineering and the command deck on level 3 and 3.1. Level 4 above the bridge had crew quarters, life support and all the other stuff needed to keep me happy. Shield generators were mounted against the outer hull at all eight corners. Just in front of the joined hull sitting on the lowest deck I had a pair of shuttle bays, each with four launch tubes and a shuttle hatch. These were designed for fighters; you could just squeeze a heavy fighter through the hatch using the tractors and repulsors of the landing array. You could sit sixteen interceptors or eight heavies in each bay. The Titans main shuttle bay was up in the humpback; this was big enough for cargo shuttles and had a hatch that could take something the size of a Gunship if needed. Passenger space was the Titans original capacity. Two decks along the top of the hull between the bridge and the shuttle bay. Forty cabins on the lower deck, twenty on the upper deck along with a big passenger lounge and facilities. Not that I carried many passengers though. Cargo hold one was the entire front half of the combined hull, the port and starboard hull walls folded down and I could get something the size of a Destroyer through each side. Then I had eight smaller cargo bays in the rear half of the titan hull, each one stacked up on top of the fighter bays along the join with the battleship section aft. These had been where the other hanger bays had been and still had shuttle hatches though the fighter cradles and launch tubes had been removed by the navy. Oh something else. The aft section had transport pods between the decks and sections but they didn’t connect to the forward section. The titan hull had transport pods between the shuttle bay, the passenger decks and the bridge. But there was no powered connection from there to the aft. Fleet engineers had installed some large corridors along the roof of the cargo bays but from the forward area to the launch bays and the aft you had to walk. Three hundred meters. The only way to move small cargo from the Titan shuttle bay aft to engineering or the fighter bays was along these corridors which had been built big but it was still a complete pain. Not that I spent much time hauling the sort of small very valuable cargo that came and went in shuttles. Total cargo was 2000tons per small bay and in the hanger bays unless I was carrying some combat drones, not that I would ever carry something that illegal. Cargo one held 30,000tons. Plus there might have been another 800 tons or so of extra cargo space in a few out of the way corners. So my public cargo was 50,000 or 46,000 if I was using the fighter bays for non cargo. I could tuck in another 5,000 tons using the Titan shuttle bay if I wanted to. The warp drive didn’t worry about weight, the sub light drives were built to push a fully loaded and armoured battleship around so they didn’t worry about the weight but the titan hull frame would buckle when manoeuvring sub light if I was hauling more than the maximum tonnage in cargo. About the only time I slowed down was with a cruiser on each side of the battleship hull and a full load in the titan cargo bays. If I ever hauled bulk cargo I could pack in roughly 420,000 cubic meters of load in cargo one and 28,000 cubic meters in each of the small bays. Though since the war I had never used a fraction of this cargo capacity, I would go broke trying to haul bulk cargo. Dreadnaught was a lot more expensive to run that the huge cargo ships hauling hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo each between confederation worlds. So I made my money hauling smaller, more select cargo. The sort of stuff that came with risks and paid very very well. Energy reserves at 100%, all reactors fully fuelled and good for the next ten years or so. Fabricators and food processors all fully stocked. One of me contacted the Highport and downloaded the latest entertainment packs. Twenty two engineering drones all showing green. Fifteen maintenance Drones likewise. Four cargo drones. A medical Drone. Me. All crew present and accounted for. Warp drives spinning up. Course set. Clearance to depart given. Let’s hope this cargo run is a bit less interesting that it sounded like. Chapter Three Confederation Civilian Star ship Dreadnaught. Tangeric Sector. Deep space en route to 2894-7462-D Crew deck 08:14 Terran Standard Time. Friday. About an hour out from the nameless and empty system that was the collection point. I slowed down to take some long range scans. Two small rock worlds in the inner orbital positions, then a supergiant with multiple moons in the number four slot. Asteroid belts in three and five. The asteroid belt in the five slot was immense, either several worlds or one very big planet had failed to form there. Nothing special about the place which was why it had been bypassed. The Fibbs system report seemed correct. Oh right, you don’t know about Fibbs or the empty systems. Well it’s the way the warp drive works. Back in the day pre faster than light everyone was looking at the nearby worlds for colonisation and resources and the like. Then along came the first working warp drive and suddenly it didn’t matter. See the space time warp drive uses a pair of offset cycling super dense loops, they spin about a million times a second and as they come together at the closest point they create a compression effect in space ahead of them, then as they spin around to the point where they are furthest apart they create an expansion effect behind the ship. Simplest way to explain it is a push pull. The ship is pushed into the compressed area of space ahead of it by the expansion of the space behind it. About a million times a second. The ship doesn’t actually move in space time because space is being moved around it. So no feeling of acceleration or anything. To start with it was crude, about a light year a week. But once they got it to work they quickly improved it and all sorts of new technology came out of it as well, artificial gravity fields for one. Then with hyper dense gravity fields replacing the super dense matter in the wheels warp drives got faster and faster. What happened was that suddenly Terra could not only reach the closest worlds but once they passed the light year a day speed they could reach worlds much further away. So there was no need to waste time with any world or system that wasn’t immediately useful. The rocks, the uninhabitable worlds and the systems low in resources were bypassed. We expanded out in a globe and we, maybe, stopped to colonise or exploit about one system in five. It simply wasn’t worth the time and effort to go into a marginal system when a better one was only a few days away. Of course the further out we went the slower we expanded, globe and all that. By the Orc war Terran space was about two hundred lights in radius, now it’s getting towards three hundred lights. A good two hundred and fifty systems and worlds with colonies or mines or some sort of presence and four times as many empty ones. The confederation produce an official world and system listing. Fibbs is the unofficial one, it takes the official stuff and adds all sorts of up to date and useful stuff like pirate warnings, unofficial colonies, places to visit or avoid. Handy stuff to people who may happen to do business around the edges. So anyway the Terran Confederation is officially 300 odd lights in radius but most of the systems are not Confed. There are a few independents, a bunch of associate worlds, a load of Confed worlds in non Confed systems. It’s a mess but it’s good for business. See one system could be Confed but the main inhabited world isn’t. So inside the 100,000Km jurisdiction of the world it’s not Confed space anymore. In other systems the world is Confed but the system isn’t so outside of the 100,000Km limit you are outside of Confed space. Confed member worlds and systems honour Confed laws, others may uphold them or ignore them or refuse to follow them. It’s a huge tangled mess and it’s a great place to do business. The inner worlds and systems slowly become pure Confed but out here in the frontier and the expansions there was plenty of business to be had. Anyway the nav charts for the system match so it was time to head in, destination being one of the bigger moons round the super giant. I’m guessing fleet have something sitting there all secret and the like. The final hour was quiet and I dropped down to sublight as I approached. I was target locked and hailed as soon as I dropped out of warp. Real friendly bunch to be sure. Then I had a couple of Link heavy fighters behind me and a whole load of target locks coming from the moon and orbit. You would think I hadn’t been invited. This lot have a serious problem, maybe they should get some help, all this anti social behaviour can’t be good for them. Orders to follow a precise flight path, a set speed, no deviations of I would be destroyed. No active sensors, scanners being jammed. If this is how they treat the guests how what do they do to intruders? “Agincourt calling Dreadnaught. Kinja you worthless spacer, is that you over there?” That’s Captain Welut to you sunshine, wait a minute. Agincourt. That sounds like, is that Captain Corbee speaking? “Indeed it would be, I hope you have permission to be here, I would hate to destroy that fine old ship.” I sure do. What are you doing out here in the wastes, scratch that, what are you still doing flying a strike cruiser. You should be an Admiral by now, it’s not like we didn’t see enough action in the war to get you a fast track. “I made it to fleet captain after the war but promotions are slow. Besides you know me, my place is the bridge of a warship. I’m no desk pilot.” True enough. Agincourt was the third strike cruiser built; she and Dreadnaught had fought a lot of battles together. Her crew were one of the better ones, I like to think working with me and the civilian navigators had moderated all that military starch. By the end of the war I got on fairly well with most of the original Link crews. The newer ones, not so much and the post war ones seem to think I’m one step up from a traitor or some such. Still I’ll go out of my way for the veterans. We shed blood together and that’s a damn sight more important than some bullshit rules. Hey Corbee, what exactly is your bright shiny strike cruiser doing out here? “Security. Classified. Hopefully the admiral will bring you up to speed. From what I hear we are going to be working together on this one.” Just like the old days eh? Who we shooting at and who is shooting at us? “Sorry Dreadnaught, the admiral will fill you in.” I can hardly wait. Dreadnaught approaching destination, where exactly do you guys want me to dock? The strike cruiser Agincourt signed off but there was a message pulse included under the voice message. An old encryption, a squadron code we used in the war. Probably unknown to the fleet intel types. ‘Watch your back Kinja, this one is deep black and the admiral is a pack of crows.’ Deep black I got, we flew more than a few of those in the war and they were never nice, that means the powers that be will hide things from us and almost certainly not give us the truth or the whole picture. Like jumping into find a pair of Orc battleships they didn’t tell us about because the spy that told them they were there was too valuable to risk exposing. In fact they sent us in to test if the spy’s info was any good. We lost a bunch of fighters on that run, took out one battleship and ended up running for our lives. Deep black, just another name for bending over and dropping your shorts so fleet could bugger you. Pack of crows though, what was that about. Reference search, crows. Terran birds, scavengers, black feathers, collective noun a murder of crows. Oh deep joy. The admiral was a murdering officer. See there are two sorts of staff officers as far as sending people into war. Killing officers and murdering ones. A killing officer will get you killed by mistake; a murdering officer will get you killed on purpose. Acceptable casualties, sacrificed for the good of the mission. A proper murdering bastard. # The moon was an airless rock which was handy since they directed me to a surface landing. Dreadnaught can in theory land on a planetary surface but it tears off anything not firmly fixed to the hull, little things like sensors and comms arrays. Nothing important. No atmosphere made it a lot easier, not easy but easier. I did mention I’m not the most brilliant pilot in the verse right? My normal idea of flying is a nice straight line, shields up and shuttles coming to me with cargo. Landing gear deployed, ground coming up, very precise landing instructions. I rotated slightly and settled down. The ten meter shocks on the landing legs collapsing to absorb the impact, alloys flexing to take the load. Ok I was down, manoeuvre drives shut down. A grav sled flew towards my port fighter bay and requested permission to land. They were here to collect me. I had the rest of me lock everything down and grabbed the closest transport pod down to the lowest level then walked through the connecting bulkheads and airlocks and down to the fighter bay. While doing the walk I had a good look around on passives and optical scanners. I was sitting on one of three huge landing pads, each able to take a thousand meter ship. A cluster of smaller 200 meter pads were off to one side, a number of low buildings off to the other. I could see several gun positions, short range rapid fire pulse cannon, orbital anti shipping stuff, point defence clusters. That was just the stuff I could see. Every structure looked heavily armoured and there were shield generators for what I guessed was a defence dome. My landing bay contained a small fleet flyer, one pilot and a pair of fleet marines in armoured suits. I was wearing my ship suit so I didn’t bother with a space suit, hey I didn’t think they asked me to fly all the way here just to space me. The marines gave me the once over then climbed into the flyer behind me. No one said anything and all three of them were blocked. No names or anything. What is the point in having the entire population implanted with vat grown bioware so we could all talk the same language and find out about people without all that embarrassing social interaction and asking stuff if you blocked all the time. Nice day isn’t it, the weather here always this good? They ignored me. The flyer pilot was good, not a link but still a damn fine pilot, he flew across the cluster of low buildings and dropped to the roof of one, a hatch cycled open and he dropped us into a landing bay and settled onto the ground nice and smooth. If he had the genes he would have made a damn fine Link Interceptor pilot. Wait, which one of me thought that. Why would I wish that on anyone, bunch of glory boys. The overhead hatch slid across and closed. Internal displays said atmosphere was filling the landing bay and after a minute the side door swung open and the marines climbed out, the second one gestured for me to follow him. # Standard fleet base design. Dull grey walls, dull grey floors, dull grey ceilings. No markings anywhere, well none I could see. Everything would be encrypted and visible only to those with the right clearance. If you had a high enough security level the place would be full of names and numbers and signs. One of the things that can be done with targeted data transitions. In the civilian world most people transmit a social intro all the time. Some flag a special interest group or sexual preference and only send full details to someone that meets their categories. You could walk through a room and get everyone’s names and general details just by looking at them then see someone with the same interests and suddenly you can see loads more information about them. Like I said, it’s much better than all that having to go up to strangers and ask questions. With the military though the most basic signs and things like room numbers are only visible to military personnel. Then more signs and details are only available to higher ranks or specialist ranks or duties. It’s not so much that the signs are invisible, it’s just when your line of sight crosses a data plate your implants query it, it checks the level of your query, your details and such like and then sends you what information is allowed. This then pops up in your visual cortex as if you were seeing it on the wall or over the persons head. It’s a great way of doing things and you can go sightseeing and get all that interesting historic and touristy stuff just by looking at something. Here all I could see were blank grey walls and doors. Good job I had a pair of marines to follow. The place was a maze, corridors and doors going off in all directions, much bigger than the visible building above, there must be a network of tunnels connecting everything together below the surface. Left two, across a junction, next right. Then down two floors on a ramp, left one. Through a blast door and then right. Into a large comfortable looking room, morph chairs, a bar which was closed, several Tri D wall screens, a load of entertainment tables and consoles. A crew lounge, officers most likely as it was all new and shiny rather than a lived in and much used enlisted room. A whole load of people standing around talking in groups. The old guy from the admiral’s office along with a bunch of egg heads, pale complexions, comfortable clothing and fit enough to lift a cup of tea or a data slat if they used both hands. Weedy was not the word. Another group, fleet officers, junior ranks, for the use of. Haircuts, brooms up backsides to keep the spines straight and squinty eyes from staring down their noses at everyone. The admiral with a few staff officers and what looked like the same Orc. Maybe it’s a pet of some sort? One of the staff commanders looked familiar for some reason. Couldn’t place him but I knew him from somewhere. A pair of Orcs standing by themselves off to one side, glaring at everyone else and each other. Both in the alloy flex armour that made up the basic Orc military uniform. No idea what the badges and marks on the armour meant, to be honest I didn’t much care. For a fleet officer the admiral sure kept a lot of Orcs around the place. Me I would have kicking the fouls smelling filth out of the closest airlock. That would be murder. What, oh yea right, thanks for pointing that out, now go back to looking after the sensors and stop thinking for me. Sometimes it’s like having a dozen me’s in my head at the same time. Orcs are all peaceful and friendly now so it’s a crime to kill them. About the only thing I hate worse than an Orc is a politician, first kill all the politicians then wipe out the Orcs and the verse would be a nicer place. Smell better too. The admiral glanced my way and said something, the staff officer I was trying to remember looked at me and didn’t look happy, then he started walking towards me. The look on his face said he really didn’t like me. Where had I met him before? Had I cheated him in a trade deal? Didn’t think so. So where did I....... Aha. Last year, Confederation planet called, what was it, Standish, Stallish, something like that? I was more than a bit drunk and I picked him up in a bar, didn’t know he was fleet at the time. He was just a good looking Mansh and I wanted some company. He was really crap in bed though and I kicked him out and ordered a hotel whore instead. I remember he got really nasty at the time, seemed to think he was god’s gift or some such. Hell he couldn’t find his own ass without a map, never mind mine. Plus no imagination, didn’t like anything kinky and wanted to be on top all the time, that’s just greedy. Oh and when he turned nasty after I told him to get his worthless carcass out of my bed before I feel asleep waiting for him to get me excited, he pulled that whole I’m bigger than you and your about to get a fist in the face thing. After I pushed a holdout pulser up between his legs he got real meek and left. Guess that’s why he’s still upset. Hey you can’t blame me! I wanted some fun and got Mr. useless in the sack! What’s a Mansh. Right sorry, keep forgetting you don’t know anything. Terran humans have six sexs, all the gene mods and such fit within the six. Three are Male and three are female. So you have the standards, Male and Female. Bog standard as they were born, bits in the right places. Then we have Mansh and Femen, Male shes and Female men, body form of a man or woman but the bits between the legs from the other side. So a Mansh has the broad shoulders and narrow hips classic male shape plus muscles etc of a man but a vag and optionally a womb depending on how good the doc was. Femen have narrow shoulders, broad hips, standard female body but with meat and two veg if you get my meaning. Sort of best of both worlds. The last pair are the neuts, it stands for sex drive neutralised but it often gets called neuters. Man or women who have use medical methods to eliminate sex drive and associated bits like balls or a womb. They are really spooky people, stable, balanced, focused on tasks at hand and next to no ability to interact with other humans. Very specialised subset. Anyway lover boy was a Mansh, a man with a vag. Well he walked over to me and was standing just outside of reach, the look in his eyes suggested I should probably never put my life in his hands, he looks seriously pissed. Hey I didn’t remember him, what’s the problem, or doesn’t he get treated like that often? Can’t understand how he has such an attitude, anyone who slept with him would have the same low opinion of him. Oh the admiral would like to see me, well by all means lead on sunshine. Wow, next step steam coming up from under the collar of his fleet dress uniform, why did they go back to stiff collars. Bloody uncomfortable, must be the whole staff officer masochist thing. So I follow Mr. Useless in bed across the room to the admiral. “Captain Welut, you made good time I see.” Not as good as you admiral, you look like you have been here a while. “I have assets that you could not dream about Captain Welut. But even I need to hire in outside help from time to time. Which is why you are here. “If would be kind enough to allow my people to connect you to the network here we can issue you security access and send you the briefing.” A contact request popped up, I answered it and was suddenly informed that I now had Security access general level three and project Falling Ember (restricted) level four and a Gigaton of data dockets. Let’s see, updated military protocols, 14,000 pages of legal documents indemnifying fleet from any loss of limb, life or damage to or loss of ship I may suffer as a result of my own stupidity in service, 19,000 pages setting the legal case for me or my next of kin to take legal action against damage or loss I suffer as a result of serving with fleet as a civilian consultant while obeying orders. Security clearance. Level three general clearance, that’s about the basic they give the grunts. Level four with regard to project Falling Ember whatever that is. Aha, a folder called Falling Ember. Let’s see, resupply run to a research base called Delta Three. Base out of contact, don’t recognise the system name. Navigation address must be wrong. This thing is way off, far beyond Confederation space. Hey admiral, got your briefing, this Delta three you want me to visit. Is this nav data correct because I see this as well outside Confed space, in fact its 743 lights from the closest edge of Confed space and 953 lights from this system. At three hours a light year it’s a 17 week trip. You want something a bit faster than me for this run. “Captain if you look at the nav charts you will see the destination is the far side of a high energy nebula, going through that at warp is dangerous. You need to add another 140 light years to the distance travelled to reach Delta 3 by warp.” That’s over 19 weeks flight time. Most of a year to get there and back. You don’t want me; you need a fast fleet transport for this run not something that takes three hours per light. One of the new swift class, One hour twenty mins per light and they have plenty of cargo space for a supply run. Your list here has only 11,000 tons. That’s a fraction of mine. “We need your ship captain because you have the only ship suitable for this mission. If you look at the cargo list you will see a section labelled fleet assets.” I took a quick look while he was talking. “That will give you a better idea of what you will be carrying.” 11,000 tons of general stores and supplies, fabricator raw materials, luxuries. Then another list of assets, 20 Link Interceptors, 6 Link heavy fighters, four marine assault shuttles, all with flight and ground crews. 132 assorted fleet and mission personnel, fleet strike cruiser Agincourt. Hypercom relay platform, ground Hypercom station, the docket went on and on. Just a minute. Agincourt! Why is the strike cruiser listed as cargo, its faster than I am? “No captain, not for this. Agincourt would take far too long to reach Delta three and could not possibly carry enough supplies. I want my people on site within five weeks.” No can do sunshine, no way am I fast enough to cross that distance in five weeks. Nothing is, there isn’t a ship in existence that can get there that fast. “You are correct captain. Which is why we will be fitting your ship with a newly developed Procyon Drive.” (Long silent pause) Well bugger me sideways! Chapter Four Confederation Civilian Star ship Dreadnaught. Tageric Sector. 2894-7462-D Confederation Secret research base 10:19 Terran Standard Time. Saturday. Primary weapons control me kindly pointed out I was standing there with my mouth hanging open. Thanks. Procyon drives, they were all destroyed. Why, suddenly, is fleet building them again. Also what is with the newly developed bit, we had them thirty years ago? “Check the briefing notes captain, there is a summery in the Falling Ember docket that will answer all your questions.” Ok so that’s me dismissed then, I’ll go stand in the corner while me and several of me have a good read. Did I mention just how anti social these fleet types are? Not much small talk or chatting, or was it just me? Ok Falling Ember. I started at the beginning and the rest of me started reading various sections and sub files. Delta 3 was a long range research base. Set up just after the war. Not much in the way of other history, no mention of why it was there. Something to do with deep range communications research and the nebulae. A load of data had come from there as to the nature of subspace, enough to restart the Procyon Drive research anyway. The base had been supplied by ships twice a year but fleet had decided to build a Hypercom out there, it's way out of range but by leaving relay satellites every 40 or so light years and going round the nebulae they could set up communications. No idea what this Delta 3 is doing but the cost of a thousand light year chain of Hypercom relays is staggering, they are not small or cheap and that is a huge distance to cover. So what is Delta 3, other than above my security clearance. Anyway the ship they sent out to build the Hypercom network had everything required to get it up and running, fleet waiting till four weeks after the expected date of the first message from the base and then sent a ship to find out what had happened to the first ship. They could talk to every Hypercom relay so they got to within 40 lights of Delta 3. The problem was probably the first ship not reaching the base since if it had then they could have built the Hypercom and sent a message, so ship loss of drive or significant damage between the last relay and the base. The ship they sent to find out what had happened to the first ship was expected to get there 9 weeks ago. They got a message from the rescue ship via the last relay, everything OK up to that point, making the last run to the base. Then nothing, no Hypercom message which was bad because the second ship should have been able to warp the 40 light years to the closest relay and send a message that way, unless it had had an accident as well. So a whole year near enough since anyone had contact with Delta 3. Which is why they were sending a Strike Cruiser and a bunch of Link fighters, in case there were any more ‘accidents’. But they would take months to get there and there was some sort of rush so in comes yours truly. A Procyon of all things, I hadn’t heard a single rumour they had started building them again. Plus why Dreadnaught, why not put one in a strike cruiser, OK so it would need to make three jumps with a day or two of cooling down in between but it would still get a warship there fast. The drive is too big; it’s the same as the first time. The prototype drive is huge so they need something the size of a battleship. Ah right OK, but why not use a battleship. They had some in mothballs somewhere didn’t they? Same as they did when they created Dreadnaught. Four battleships were mothballed in Mars orbit; they could have used one of them. So why didn’t they? No idea. There was a problem with reconditioning them, something about delays that would put the project back months. It’s in the notes of appendix 93. Oh, right. Oh OK. So they had to get me in to meet the admiral’s deadline. Seems likely. Yes. What, I’m having a discussion with two of the other me’s. It happens. So to summarise. Delta 3 secret research base hell and gone into unexplored space out of contact for a year. Urgent need to get there within five weeks but no reason why the rush. Prototype crazy drive, no details on why it’s another prototype or what was wrong with the old Procyons or why they stopped using them. A simple supply run well beyond explored space with a strike cruiser, fighters and a couple of platoons worth of troops. All run as a ‘need to know’ black op so they weren’t telling me jack and the guy in charge was a bastard who would write us all off for the good of the mission. Probably hostiles at the far end, the strike cruiser and fighters aren’t there for decoration. Ground combat or a lot of boarding otherwise what are the marine assault shuttles for. Anything I missed. Oh right, enough spare weapons, charge packs and armour for a company of troops, anti armour weapons. Breaching charges, two field medic drones, enough food packs to keep a few hundred people fed for five years. A replacement Hypercom, a Hypercom relay. So just what we needed to fight a small war and expecting both previous ships to have been lost to hostile action. Nothing I didn’t do during the war, when there was a war on and I had a fleet to support me. Oh and when I had weapons on my hull. But as they say. Wars long over, we are all just folk now. Time for a little chat with whatshisname the admiral about ‘Hell No’ # While I had been going over the folders and information the admiral had wandered off so I had to go ask his minions where he was. Under normal circumstances I could just have used the local net to query his location but I wasn’t allowed to because it wouldn’t talk to someone with my low security clearance and he was blocked anyway. Hey guys where did your boss wander off to? They pointed me to one of the corridors leading out of the far side of the room so I wandered over there. More corridors and blank doors. I wandered around for a bit then found a pair of Marines standing guard on yet another corridor. They told me the admiral was in his office but I wasn’t cleared to access this area. What am I, a leper or something, no one talks to me, everyone has their implants blanked and they won’t tell me jack. I’m getting to feel unpopular round here. Anyway one of them finally agreed to comm the Admiral and let him know I wanted a word, after keeping me waiting for ten more minutes while the fleet brass finished his tea or some other task more important than me I was allowed to enter the corridor and then the admirals office. Does this guy have some sort of complex? This one was just as luxurious as the last one even down to the ankle deep rugs. As I strolled in the admiral was on the comm but he shut it down quickly, no one else in the room. I glanced around to see if anyone like his pet Orc were hiding in the corners. Nope, just me and the brass. Hey commodore. I read your files and let me tell you, this stinks. I put up with this shit in the war but I’ll be dammed if I put up with it now. You tell me what this is really about or I’m off. Hey, he went a nice shade of red when he got angry. “You agreed to a contract”. He paused and almost spat out my title. “Captain!” What I agreed to Sunshine was to come out here to pick up a cargo for delivery, no one said anything about playing guinea pig to another experimental crazy drive, no one said anything about playing battle taxi for a combat unit, no one said anything about missing ships and no one said anything about having to deal with this paranoid bullshit you fleet types live for. You have Orcs here and you won’t tell me what’s going on, Do the Orcs know, do you trust the Orcs more than me because fuck you if that’s the case. I paused to draw breath. “The Orcs are an important part of this mission. ‘They’ are not smugglers; they do not have a criminal record that runs to 27 pages. They obey orders and most importantly they do not talk to me like that. No one talks to me like that.” Yeah, well it won’t be happening again on account of me leaving. Have fun getting to your mystery base commodore. I’m gone. While I was talking, well shouting really, the admiral just looked at me. Then he opened a draw behind the desk, reached into it and pulled out a folder. He opened the folder and took out a sheet of paper. Paper. Wow. Not often you see that stuff these days, anything written goes on plas. He slid the sheet of paper across the desk toward me and turned it round so I could read it. The seal of the Confederation was big and gold and bloody obvious on top of the page. Below it I scanned the titles and wording. Council of the Confederation. Department of Security. Department of Defence Notification of change of reserve status. Welut, Kinja. Notification that subject has been placed on reserve status for military service as civilian contractor (pilot and master of independent ship Dreadnaught). Notification of activation of emergency / war powers act under specific order of Confederation Council. With immediate effect the emergency / war powers act section 48, paragraph 19, sub section 294 is hereby activated with regard to Project Falling Ember, all assets, facilities and personnel currently attached to or required to be attached to Project Falling Ember hereby come under the Emergency / War powers act as detailed. Notification of activation of standby military classification. Welut, Kinja. Notification of activation of reserve status with immediate effect, subject is called to military service as civilian contractor (pilot and master of independent ship Dreadnaught) under the authority of project Falling Ember. Notification of activation of reserve military status of vessel Dreadnaught declared surplus to requirements under surplus war material act CC-D4821. Civilian vessel Dreadnaught is hereby transferred from Civilian (non reserve vessel) to Civilian (fleet auxiliary reserve vessel) as detailed under the Emergency / War powers act section 48, paragraph 19, sub section 312 to 317. Notification of transfer to active military status of military reserve vessel Dreadnaught. Fleet auxiliary reserve vessel Dreadnaught is hereby activated to military service as a fleet auxiliary. Dreadnaught is transferred to service with fleet intelligence command as a detached auxiliary support vessel to undertake such duties as required by fleet intelligence under the authority of project Falling Ember. You have to be bloody kidding me. YOU’RE DRAFTING ME! This isn’t legal. No way can you do this! The admiral had the faintest of smiles in the corner of his mouth. Oh Fuck. # After a quick check with everyone and a high priority query via the base Hypercom which they very kindly let me hack I had checked the law. And I was buggered. The emergency powers thing had been activated and I had been drafted. I was back in the fleet as a civilian contractor and Dreadnaught was back to being a fleet auxiliary. Problem here was the same as the war. They had Dreadnaught all legal and below board so even if I tried to quit they still had the ship, it was useless without me but then I was fairly useless without her. Have I mentioned yet how much I HATE working with the arseholes in fleet command! Due to the time restrictions and all, the base engineers had already started setting up around the rear of the ship and while I stood outside the Admirals office fuming about the injustice of it all they pinged me requesting I contact them or return to my ship. Not being in the best of moods I decided to make them wait and walked back to the lounge then took my time finding someone to take me back to the shuttle bay. By the time I got back to my ship it was a good forty minutes after the comm call. Though if I had been hoping to find a bunch of impatient engineers hanging around I was very disappointed. There were a bunch of drones and three people in engineering hard suits, though Sensors was monitoring very high bandwidth transmissions between the three hard suits and Main weapons me. When I asked just what exactly my main weapons control node was doing with the engineers I got a muttered reply about being busy and some back chatter about flanking the main force and going for the troopships. Using my override for being me, captain and all that, I took a peek and found the four of them were playing a VR game, Strike Cruiser Vanguard 9 no less. Here I am trying to keep them waiting and one of me is keeping them entertained playing reruns of the Orc wars. I used my captains override and coughed loudly into the comm channel. “Ah captain, there you are.” Yep, here I am, did I keep you waiting? “Not at all, we have been, dealing with a technical problem will we waited.” Aright I’m here. What’s going on? The three engineers activated grav packs and drifted around to the stern of the ship, two back a few meters, the other facing me. He raised the armoured head shield on his suit and dialed down the tint so I could see his face through the helmet visor. He looked like someone’s kindly granddad and suddenly I felt guilty for trying to give him a hard time. It’s not as if it was his fault. OK what’s the plan then? “The plan is to use molecular cutters to slice through the rear structural beams, slide in the Procyon and nano weld the beams back then put the outer hull back in. It’s how the drive was removed the last time, there are no power or system relays across the aft hull so we won’t need any rewiring. Be done in two days, seventy two hours tops.” He looked up at the hull of Dreadnaught towering above us. “Don’t you worry yourself none captain. This drive was specifically built for this ship, we had the specs down to the nanometer. The drive will slide in nice and neat and once we put everything back you will never notice a thing.” Just a minute. You said the drive was built for Dreadnaught, what about the other hulls, the war era battleships? “War era. I don’t know anything about that. We started building the drive over a year ago, six months ago when we got to the outer shell and external support structure we had a set of plans we had to match exactly. We had to build it to fit the engineering section of your Dreadnaught, that’s how we were told to build it and that’s how we built it.” I thought Dreadnaught was a last minute choice, that there was an old war era battleship pulled out of Mothball reserve but something went wrong with the refurbishment. “Sorry captain, you must have heard wrong. All I know is we had the plans of your engineering areas six months ago and we were told to built the drive to fit your ship exactly. Never been otherwise.” Right, maybe I heard it wrong. Thanks anyway. Oh one more thing. Not a scratch, you hear me, not a scratch. The engineer chuckled and walked away then spoke over his shoulder. “If we scratch your ship captain I promise we will give you a nice new paint job.” Then he walked around the landing gear and I could no longer see him, but I heard his chuckle for several more seconds. So yet another lie. Black ops. Fleet not telling me the truth again. Damn, this felt like being back in the war but at least then I knew who the enemy was supposed to be. Now, I had no idea who was on my side but at least I had a fairly good idea who wasn’t. I couldn’t wait to see what happened next. Yes I’m being sarcastic. # No Captain ever likes to see their ship being cut up but on the other hand there is the morbid need to watch and the worry that if you are not standing there looking over the engineers shoulders they will so something wrong. As it turned out they were pretty good and removed the aft armour then sliced through the meters thick structural beams in less than a standard day. The Procyon drive was floated up from a deep bunker on the far side of the base and no less than three grav tugs carried it gently across to where Dreadnaught was docked. I stood and watched it drift overhead and towards the gapping wound that was my ships aft. The original Procyons had been roughly spherical, this was the same but it was covered in bulges and sections of the outer plating twisted in a strange way. I found myself staring at the patterns the twisted and warped sections made on the hull and suddenly found myself feeling dizzy for some reason. I hadn’t eaten anything other than nutrient paste since they started cutting up my ship so my blood sugar was probably bottoming out. Anyway the new drive slide into the aft hull like a hand into a synthi silk glove and once the drones and engineering team sensors had confirmed everything was good they moved in grav floaters with nano welders and the missing structural beams and sections. One team was working outside to rebuild the aft hull while another was inside locking the drive into place and connecting up the massive power grid and the thousands of control connections. In the end they missed the two day promise, but 61 hours after starting they had the entire ship rebuilt and back to its normal condition and the new drive was now a permanent part of Dreadnaught. I linked to one of the grav capable maintenance drones and floated it into the engineering void to inspect everything for myself. I’ve been places, seen things, I fought the Orc war, I’ve seen worlds burning. But nothing I have ever seen upset me as much as that one look at the new drive. The inside of Dreadnaughts rear hull is fairly empty, with the Ion plasma drives top and bottom there is a network of corridors and rooms and all the empty volumes where the missile and torpedo bays and rear turrets should have been. But sitting at the centre of all of that was the new Procyon drive. A mottled mix of dark grey and black, almost a sphere but uncomfortable to look at as your eye is drawn into the spirals and twists. It sat there like a huge malevolent spider at the centre of a web of alloy beams and corridors. It gave me the creeps and no mistake. Bloody stupid, I know, I tried to tell myself that a captain that is afraid of her own ships drive system is about ready for retirement. It didn’t help. I had to put the drone on automatic and cut the link. I just couldn’t look at the new Procyon any longer. # With the work complete it was time to power the drive up for its first test. My plan was to power it up and run tests and plot a navigation run without going active. Me being me I was thinking about being a million Km away from anything in deep space. The Admiral didn’t like that idea, seemed to think I would steal his new drive or some such. The egg heads got together and sent the head scientist to assure everyone that it would be perfectly safe to power up the drive will sitting on the landing pad. It was just a test after all and perfectly safe. As long as I didn’t try to make a jump from the surface that is. I may have said a few sarcastic things while promising not to accidentally jump anywhere from a landing pad. Finally we got everything sorted and ready for the test. Everyone left the ship; I bought all on board systems to full alert and ran a complete series of system tests, twice. Just in case I was going to run this test from the forward bridge perched on the hull of the titan that was Dreadnaughts front end. Oh and I was sealed into a proper armoured space suit rather than my normal ship suit. Just in case. All the tests came back green and 100%. Everything looked good. I began to power up the drive so I could begin to plot the jump navigation. Drive to half power and everything looking good. Drive to 60%, temperature is a bit high, not much but a bit higher than normal. Still my idea of normal was the last drive I had thirty years ago so who knew what normal was for this new one. Drive to 70%. Power drain is a bit higher than I expected and temperature is now a good 100 degrees higher than expected. Drive to 80%. Power now above the anticipated variance, outside the upper limits of expected performance in every way, definitely drawing more power and running hot. Drive to 90%. I do not like the power draw and temperature here, and the readings are fluctuating. It’s almost as if the drive is pulsing up and down by a few percent. I sounded an internal and external alarm then bought up internal shields and closed all blast doors and airtight doors. I could see the concern on the faces of the scientists in the base; my external sensors could hear alarms being sounded across the base. Shields begin to blink into existence on the closest weapon emplacements and a handful of grav vehicles quickly move away from me. Drive to 94%. The fluctuation is getting worse, temperature is now a thousand degrees over expected. I bring up full shields, raise containment shields around engineering as well. Every shield Dreadnaught has is at full at full power. Drive to 97%. All eight reactors now at 112% output and rising. Aborting power up, something is very wrong with this piece of junk and I don’t want it exploding inside my ship. DRIVE ACTIVE. It went active. It was at 98%, then the high point of one of those pulses took it to 100%. EMERGENCY ALERT: HULL BREACH Section 4/2 EMERGENCY ALERT: HULL BREACH Section 4/3 EMERGENCY ALERT: HULL BREACH Section 3/3 EMERGENCY ALERT: HULL BREACH Section 3/5 EMERGENCY ALERT: CATASTROPHIC PRESSURE LOSS Deck 3 EMERGENCY ALERT: HULL BREACH Section 3/6 EMERGENCY ALERT: HULL BREACH Section 2/3 EMERGENCY ALERT: HULL BREACH Section 6/1 EMERGENCY ALERT: THERMAL ALERT Procyon Drive +2210 degrees EMERGENCY ALERT: CATASTROPHIC PRESSURE LOSS Deck 4 EMERGENCY ALERT: THERMAL ALERT Section 3/2 -273 degrees EMERGENCY ALERT: THERMAL ALERT Section 4/2 -241 degrees I shut off the alarms and the alert notices. Three of me had cut power to the Procyon drive, boosted the containment fields and diverted all power to everything holding me together. Damage control showed the entire rear hull was plastered with flashing red, both engineering decks were breached in dozens of places. I had decks so cold the atmosphere was falling like snow and in the drive room alloy beams were glowing white hot. I turned to the comm and looked into the shocked face of the chief scientist. His elderly face bloodless and stunned. Me screaming in his face didn’t help but I did it anyway WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO TO MY SHIP? Chapter Five Confederation Civilian Star ship Dreadnaught. Tageric Sector. 2894-7462-D Confederation Secret research base 13:32 Terran Standard Time. Wednesday. It took me a while to calm down but once I had stopped shouting I started asking some very blunt questions. My emergency systems were holding, I had deployed my full radiator array and was venting the excess drive heat easily. I had even mapped the damage across my engineering section. It wasn’t as bad as it had seemed, it almost looked like someone had sliced a couple of curved lines out from the Procyon drive and through my engineering section and adjacent areas. In fact given that those lines were about five microns thick and had vanished completely after 70 meters, it almost looked like very thin lines of the ship had been disintegrated somehow, like a mono molecular lash but massively more powerful. Which made no sense. So there I was on one comm screen grilling the science team when a command override opened a second window, the admiral had made an entrance and was demanding to know what had happened and half the base was now pointing weapons my way expecting me to either explode or do something really bad. The admiral was bright red and shouting, his voice went up in pitch when he got angry and he was screeching now. “Professor you told me this wouldn’t happen, you told you have fixed this! What are you people doing here. If you can’t do the job I’ll get someone who can.” “Admiral I told you we thought we had fixed it, we reinforced the shielding. It shouldn’t have happened, it must be a problem with the ship. It’s too old, the failure must have been there. My shields should have stopped any dimensional rift.” Just a damn minute people. I had heard that bit and jumped in. What the hell do you mean dimensional rift, did your fucked up drive just try to suck my ship into subspace? “No, no. Not Subspace. The shields project into C space, they are designed to prevent any breech, this shouldn’t have happened. I reinforced them specially. This isn’t my fault; it must be the old systems on your ship. They are no good.” I interrupted him before he spent too much time insulting Dreadnaught. What the hell is C space and why would it be rifting? The admiral butted in quickly. “That’s classified captain. Need to know and you don’t!” Hey sunshine I don’t give a flying fuck about your secrets. This is my ship at risk here. So you want to keep me in the dark go find yourself another ship. If you can! But under confederation law draftee or not as Captain of this ship I cannot be compelled to place my vessel in danger unless I personally choose to, Civilian ship sunshine. I’m no warship you can order to do something truly stupid. Also push me much further and I’m going to forget how to navigate a Procyon drive. You get me! The admiral looked as if he was thinking about ordering his troops to storm my ship and take me prisoner when I interrupted his train of thought. Besides what is the point of not involving me? I’m the most experienced Procyon pilot and navigator, bar none. I have more time with these drives than the next two pilots put together. I worked on the first project, I spent four years flying the very first drive. I worked out how to navigate subspace and how to control the thing. You got someone around here with more experience than me, bring em out. Otherwise tell me what the hell is going on and let me help. Because if I don’t know what this fucking drive is doing it comes off my ship and that’s the end of it. The Admiral actually paused to think about that one. Then he nodded. “Very well. You are authorised to access level six details about the drive.” He glared at the professor. “Level six professor, the drive only and not a word more!” Then he cut his comm line and probably went off to shout at someone else. OK professor. What is C space, what shields, what rift? Oh and what the hell is going on? The professor didn’t look happy but he and his team started talking and they answered most of my many questions. Which left me even more confused. # I’ll start with some history from the original Procyon drive project, I knew some and the egg heads filled in a lot more. It turned out that the first drive was the work of a small number of people, five to be exact. They were the only ones who seemed to understand it; all the other brains on the team basically did what they were told. I remember meeting a few of them. They always struck me as weird but I always put it down to them being scientists and the people who had invented a drive that you had to be insane to understand. Now it turns out they came in from outside the scientific community. Invented the drive, told everyone else how to build them and were the only people who understood what they did. Hundreds of the best scientific minds in the confederation sitting scratching their arses and pretending they knew what they were doing. Admittedly, at the time, I had thought they did know what was going on. Anyway the first drive was the work of this small group of oddballs who appeared and invented the thing. Then come the end of the war they all disappeared. Not a trace, gone, never seen again. The reason why the drives were destroyed was classified above level six so they wouldn’t tell me but one of the egg heads did mention they hadn’t just destroyed them. They launched them into the heart of a star to make sure they were gone. With the five gone no one else understood enough about how the drives worked to do much but they should have been able to build more, they had the plans after all. They had engineering plans and designs; the fabricators had been programmed and had been building drives for the strike cruisers. Thing was when they tried the plans turned out to be incomplete, the fabricators built drives but they didn’t work. Nothing they did could recreate the Procyon drive and they had no idea why. So that was why they stopped building them, it didn’t explain why they destroyed the ones we had and it raised a lot more questions that were either classified above level six so they wouldn’t tell me or they just didn’t know. Anyway about ten years ago Fleet Intel reactivated the Procyon project and recalled many of the old research team. Not the five though, just the ones who made the coffee and looked busy. They also bought in load of research data from somewhere, enough to take what little had been understood from the first drive and have a go at making a new one. It took ten years to build a new drive and along the way they had discovered a few things. This one was different, the research notes contained data and equations and notes and said that the design reached across subspace and touched the other side. It was less efficient because it went deeper into subspace rather than further across subspace. But they couldn’t replicate the old drive so they were doing what they could which was use the data they had and build a drive that worked even if the way it worked wasn’t entirely what they wanted. They had a few nasty accidents along the way though. The drive pushed across subspace and opened a rift into the next dimension over, the notes called it C Space, no one knew why but it was a nasty place. They had to build shields and project those shields across subspace to block the gap created by the drive to prevent the ship or bits of it being sucked into C Space. But the shields didn’t work. Once I got them to give me the technical details and spent an hour with all of me going over the details I could see what happened. They were using three shield generators to produce sections of a shield wall that blocked the gap into C Space but the three shields didn’t overlap. When they reinforced them they created a problem along the lines where the shields met and it was these weak points that had leaked into my ship. This one was easy to solve, well not simple to do but easy to see how to do it. Lowering the power level of all three shields then synchronising the three fields to exactly match harmonic, frequency and energy cycles so they merged and created a single shield with three generators rather than three separate shields with a generator each. Just as powerful and no weak join lines. Any decent shield engineer could have solved it, which left me wondering why there were no decent engineers on this dammed project. The drive fluctuations, them I couldn’t help with. As far as I could see and I’m no egg head, the fluctuations came from C Space not the Procyon drive. Since no one seemed to have the slightest idea what C Space was we couldn’t do much about that one. Still the fluctuations were detectable and not that fast, they took about three microseconds to go from low to high. So we could monitor them and put a series of power flow modulators between the drive and my reactors to smooth out the fluctuations. Yes it did occur to me that I was doing more to make this drive work than the so called experts which worried me no end. What got me was that now I was talking to the scientists I understood how little they knew about this drive. Someone did know about it, someone had done the experiments and written all the notes and equations. So where were they, where had they done these tests, who had done them and why in hell were they not here helping to make the crazy drive work. Why was it I was trying to make this damn thing work when the people who invented it were hiding somewhere. Even worse. Why were they hiding? # The base had good engineers, which was handy given the circumstances. Damage control teams were looking at the damage as soon as I opened the blast doors and airlocks. They had sensor probes and nanoswarms mapping the exact extent of the cuts that had sliced through my aft section. Thank whatever deity you believe it that those cuts had missed the power rooms, if one of them had sliced open the containment field of one of my fusion plants the damage teams would be looking at a rebuild not a repair. What with me running military spec hot fusion plants with gravity compression, they really are miniature suns and produce the power needed to move a ship the size and mass of a battleship across the void. But unlike the civilian cool fusion plants that reacted really badly to damage. Still they were inside layers of shields, armour and reinforced hull which made them a damn sight safer that a civilian ships engineering section. Oh and warships, blowing up, they are built for that sort of thing. Not the smaller stuff, a Destroyer or corvette that lost Fusion containment was a cloud of plasma, but the cruisers could just about survive and the battleships, well they were Oh a small sun exploding inside me, oops, onward. The engineers reported 15 hours to fix everything which I was happy to hear. I left the rest of me to keep an eye on the repairs while I spent time talking to the egg heads and by the time I had finished coming up with solutions to the obvious problems the repairs were nearly done. Since I had all of these fleet engineers onboard anyway I got them making the changes we needed to the shield configuration and adding the power flow modulators, I could fabricate the parts with my own engineering nano-factory but it’s nice to have some skilled help to do the hands on stuff. Not that I don’t think my drones could do it, it’s just nice, that’s all. By the time the scientists and I were going round in circles with me asking the same questions and them saying either they didn’t know or couldn’t tell me I decided it was time to get some sleep. I left the engineers doing the last of the repairs and modifications and got some shut eye, the rest of me could keep an eye on things. # Five hours later and I was awake again and tossing and turning in my bed, the gravity reduction and very expensive sheets that maintained the perfect temperature for sleep, or anything else you might be doing in the bed, just were not helping. Each time I fell asleep I would wake up again with half remembered dreams of huge eyes staring at me out of the darkness and reality twisting and warping around me as it was being eaten by something I couldn’t see. The third time I woke up and I lay there for a while before deciding it wasn’t worth trying again so I got up. A long hot shower helped, breakfast helped more. I made enough money and had the space for a decent kitchen, a drone cook that had once worked in some three star restaurant and stasis booths for fresh produce. I used sythi food as well but by paying for the decent stuff and having fitted the best food synthesiser on the market I could whip up a half way decent synthi meal or a damn fine real one. So awake, clean and well fed I checked what had happened over the last few hours. My personal and ship comm queues were fairly empty, one of the perks of being out in the boondocks at a secret military base. No spam. Still the engineers reported everything fixed and modified. The chief egg head said that his team had reviewed my suggestions and having given them consideration were prepared to accept them, that’s kind of him. The admiral was chasing to find out when I was ready to try again, oh but this time he was agreeing with my original idea that I run the tests in deep space. Checking with all of me and the base I couldn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t try the drives right now so I flagged my ship status as preparing to take off and wandered down the the military bridge, may as well sit in comfort while flying around. That’s one thing with Dreadnaught, as a Battleship she would have had three bridges, one was the flight bridge, one the combat command centre and the third would be the admirals bridge where the fleet was commanded from. The flight bridge and CC were in the forward section which I didn’t have but I had a huge and very comfortable admiral’s chair on my bridge aft. Take off was mostly uneventful. I wanted to get clear of the base and feel the void beneath me so I may have gunned my drives a bit and I could possibly have drifted across the landing pad slightly. Hey, I missed the bunker by at least 50 meters, I don’t know what all the swearing was about. Anyway my sub light drives pushed my into the void and while I was moving to a safe distance I slowly bought the Procyon drive online and plotted a nice short jump. With every egg head on the base looking over my shoulder and with one very excitable admiral watching I finished the plot, I found it difficult to plot what would have been the minimum jump I was sued to and settled on a nearby system, a nice easy 32 light years away and there was a Hypercom relay in the system so I could call for help in the Procyon did anything strange, like hatch some monster from beyond. Yes it was a silly thought but that drive was still spooking me out and my dreams, or should I say nightmares were still fresh. Everything ready. All of me reported good to go. I jumped. 0.973 seconds later Dreadnaught arrived right on target. The power flow modulators were working like a charm, the modified single subspace shield had prevented any bits of me from being sucked into C space whatever the fiery pits that was and nothing had blown up. All in all a success. I used the Hypercom to call the base to report my safe arrival even though I would be back faster than the signal it sent, one second being a bit faster than 10 lights an hour. Still I sent the message, just in case, you know, safe not sorry. I was able to jump again at once, it was a short hop and hadn’t built up much heat but I waited the few minutes needed to radiate that heat anyway. Then I plotted my return trip, wresteld the wet noodles into shape and bought the drive up to full power. Everything good to go. I had the feeling I was still being watched though but that was silly, the egg heads and admiral were light years away. Still the hairs on my neck were standing up. I couldn’t see anything wrong despite my wayward hairs so I jumped back and 0.973 seconds later I was half a million Km off the base, all safe and sound. The flight back to the base and the landing were uneventful though I swear I saw the bunkers closet to my landing pad raise blast doors across their windows as I came in. Hey Admiral, reporting Dreadnaught ready to fly. # Back at the base and it was a meeting with all involved, final planning or some such. The admiral was there along with a whole mob of his staff types, about thirty egg heads. The admirals pet Orc who went by the name Shras since my new improved security clearance let me see people’s names on my implant, she standing in one corner away from the table. There were two more Orcs standing with her, another four Orcs were standing on the other side of the table, well they were standing back by the wall. Interesting, they were standing about as far from each other as the room allowed, wonder what that was about. Two marine officers, one assault commando officer, oh hey the hotness from the admirals officer was here, a gaggle of Link pilots, Captain Corbee and his second. Oh and little old me. Good job it was a big room but I still had to stand, not enough chairs, you would think in a base this size they had spare chairs, maybe it was personal since all the military types that weren’t staff remfs were also standing. The admiral started off by saying that everyone had done an adequate job getting the ship ready, Adequate, go have sex with your mother. I didn’t say that out loud but I was tempted. Then he casually mentioned that there were some changes to the plans. Oh good, last minute changes. The personnel on the mission were being changed, additional people would now be included. He sent everyone an updated list and I opened the folder for a quick look. Agincourt regular crew compliment, her security team of one marine platoon was to be augmented by a single strike commando squad. Not a problem, Agincourt had bunk space to spare. Dreadnaught. 20 interceptor pilots, 20 interceptor ground crew, 12 heavy fighter crew, 12 heavy fighter ground crew. 8 marine flight crew, 8 marine ground crew. Three 12 person marine platoons, the other two strike commando squads for another 8. This is how it had been along with 8 egg heads making 132. The number of egg heads was now 23, 15 extra scientists cluttering up the place, oh joy. Then we had a Staff captain and his aide a staff lieutenant. Oh and he had a detachment of fleet security troopers, two 5 person teams with him. The number of ground troops on this cargo run was getting worryingly high, like storming a small city high, given the capabilities of the marines and commandos in their power armour. Oh and one final addition. The Orc Shrass listed as a scientific consultant with 10 more Orcs of her retinue, staff, whatever. And an Orc called Vraan listed as battle commander along with 29 more Orcs making up a special security detachment. Do fucking what! Orcs! You are adding forty odd Orcs to this mission, what in the fiery pits is this about! Yes I said that out loud. The rest of the meeting did not go quietly. # As we left I caught the eye of Squad leader Estell Hasren and nodded then I hugged the wall and walked slowly till Captain Corbee and his exec caught up. I caught his eye as well, leaned a bit closer as I matched my walking pace to his and asked him what he thought about all this. He glanced around casually. “Been a few years Captain, why don’t you come over for dinner, say 18:30 standard. I’m sure my officers would love to meet you again, thirty years is too long to be out of touch.” Love to, I’ll be there. And there was me thinking I was paranoid, a fleet captain not wanting to talk openly in the corridor of a fleet base. A secret fleet base run by fleet intel and a wacko admiral who had a lot of Orcs on his staff and was running super secret black ops. Fiery pits, maybe the corridors were bugged. Agincourt was in orbit, its rare to see a fleet warship on the ground unless they are undergoing repairs or some such, the Orc wars was a long time ago but get caught by surprise a few times and anyone gets nervous. Besides a ship should be in the void not trapped on the ground and the strike cruisers were like birds of prey, they deserved to be free. I called ahead and Corbee sent a transfer pod down for me, I guess they reserve the shuttle for the posh visitors. Dinner was excellent, one of the advantages of being at an important and well supplied base, lots of fresh food. Plus Corbee had got his hands on a first rate chef during the war and judging by the wonderful feast that was laid out for us, he was still there. By the time we finished I was well and truly stuffed though I did ask about take away for later, hey nothing ventured as they say. Then the good drink was bought out and the captain dismissed the enlisted who were acting as waiters. Just the Agincourt’s officers and me. Time for a little talk. Chapter Six With the hatch safely shut I leaned forward in my chair. Looked straight at Corbee and asked him what was going on. He glanced around the room at his assembled officers then activated a link connection using the ships net which included me. That made me even more nervous. “Honestly, we don’t know. But it’s not going to be good. How much contact have you had with fleet over the last ten or twelve years?” Me, next to none. Since the war and being back to a civilian trade I lost contact with everyone, you were one of the last I kept in touch with and that was, what, 16 years ago. So no I haven’t had any contact with fleet, apart from the lack of them where I tend to be. Mostly I see local defence stuff or the private security ships that are just about everywhere. In fact Agincourt is the first strike cruiser I have seen in years and apart from my infrequent visits to the big confederation worlds I haven’t seen many Link fighters around either. Why? “Did you hear about the budget cuts coming through the council, the 30% reduction in defence spending across the board? Including the Link forces?” Nope, not heard about that. Cutting the links, that’s like killing the sacred cow. A few faces in the room looked disapproving so I said sorry with a smile on my face. But still, the fleet has been shrinking for years but the Link forces have always been kept at full strength. “Not any more. They are talking about mothballing the whole gunship force first then cutting the strike cruisers. Interceptors and fighters will be held for last as planetary defence.” That’s insane! With the Battleships mothballed and the old war era cruisers run down and worn out the only real firepower the fleet has left is the strike cruisers. The gunships don’t have the warp speed but they can be moved by freighters to reinforce any area that needs help. Without them the confederation is back to being a bunch of isolated planets waiting to be picked off. “That’s what we all think. Not just us, everyone linked and a most non linked. Thing is no one seems to know where its coming from, half the council seem to be in favour and the other half apart from a few veterans don’t seem to care. Years of peace, no need for the fleet anymore. The marines are facing the same so are planetary defences. Whats strange though is the steady increase in piracy, raids on outer colonies and general lawlessness on the fringes. We’ve been sent in to investigate, what, six now?” He directed the question to his exec who relied. “Seven counting the mining base on 479-2B.” He continued. Between the strike cruisers we have responded to loss of contact on more than thirty systems over the last few years and the number of raided ships is well over two hundred now. That’s the ones we know about, there are twice that number missing without trace.” I haven’t heard any of this, why haven’t I heard about this. I know pirates are getting to be more of a problem but most of them can’t touch me so I don’t worry about them but entire colonies. That’s insane, why don’t we hear about this? “Same reason you don’t hear about the defence budget cuts.” I guess, not that I’m happy to be hearing this now. But the defence budget for the entire confederation is huge, 30% of that of massive money. Where does it go if not for defence, it’s not like I see big budget increases anywhere else. “Black budgets, undeclared increases in a few places. The council is mislaying a few trillion here and there. Fleet Intel budget has all but doubled over the last ten years or so. A few other departments have expanded or vanished. Fleet Intel took over fleet internal security four years ago. Council security separated from the department of defence and became its own department the year before last. We were transferred to project Falling Ember five months ago and we have been stuck here ever since, the interceptors and heavies were bought here on a fleet transport last week. The strike commandos arrived with the admiral on a fast courier. The Orcs, the big group anyway, turned up on an Orc fast cruiser that warped in three days ago.” Whoa there, Orc warships are strictly forbidden in Confed space, no exceptions. “Fleet Intel doesn’t follow the rules or hadn’t you noticed. There’s more, just after the war R&D was big budget. It took several years into the peace for things to slow down. Delta 3 was set up just as things were being cut back but it was kept running by direct council order. Though over the years it was all but forgotten about apart from the poor sods doing the supply runs. Then ten years or so ago it was transferred from council to fleet intel and vanished from everyone’s notice. The only records I could find of the place are from before the transfer and before coming here I had never heard of the place.” I had a thought. It seems to me that a lot of things started happening ten years ago, that was when the Procyon project was restarted. “Too many things for it to be a co-incidence.” Oh hey do you know about the new drive being purpose built for Dreadnaught, the engineers here said they were given design specs of my ship while they were building it, that was months ago. Our admiral’s briefing said I was a last minute choice because the Mars battleships were no good. Funny that. Corbee looked at his exec for a few seconds. “That is no longer a surprise, all of this seems to have been planned but don’t ask me by whom. Black ops everywhere, lies and secrets, fleet being cut down. Give it another year, maybe eighteen months and we will be back to the pre war status.” That bad, crap. Why doesn’t someone say something or do something? “Such as? Half the council seems to be supporting this, fleet intel is breaking the rules and running some very suspect operations but fleet security is now run by fleet intel. Who do we talk to and what do we say, there’s no evidence of anything. Just us being suspicious.” Shit! Alright, old school thinking. Who can we trust, I trust all of you. What about the fighter group, the marines? If this turns bad and we end up getting burnt who is going to do the burning and who can we trust to not be trying to kill us? “I trust my crew, link and non. The fighter group is mostly new recruits but they have some veterans mixed in and I’ve spoken to them. They see what’s happening and they don’t like it either. The marines are fleet regulars, mine get on well with them and none of them are happy to be on an intle black op. The strike commandos, I don’t know. They are supposed to be ultra loyal to the confederation but here, who knows.” So the military are likely to be on our side, which means what. How tough are the internal security goons, there’s only ten of them. “Not that tough, light body armour and hand weapons. Don’t forget the Orcs though, I wouldn’t trust them in the slightest and if anyone was going to burn us I’d say it would be them. No real reason for them being that I know of.” Shit I was forgetting them, but the marines have battle armour and the commandos have assault suits. The Orcs and security goons can’t do much against that lot, can they? “I don’t know, they don’t seem to have the weapons to worry us but.” Primary Weapons me interrupted us. The cargo manifest listed enough heavy armour and anti armour weapons to equip all of them. “Damn.” Shit. That changes things. 40 Orcs with the latest Confed weapons and armour, if they catch the marines off guard we are screwed. “Agreed. I’ll have a word with our marine squad leader, he can mentioned our concerns to the other platoons quietly so they at least know to keep their eyes open.“ Sounds like a plan, what else can. We were interrupted at that point by Agincourts duty officer. “Sorry to interrupt captain, message from the admiral wanting to know was captain Welut still onboard and instructing that Dreadnaught be ready for cargo and passenger loading 07:00 tomorrow morning.” Still on board, the bastard is keeping track of me now. “Keeping track of all of us probably. Look we have an idea what is going on and we can cover each other’s backs. Best you head back to that rusty old cargo scow of yours and we will keep in touch by other means.” He was grinning when he said it so I took it as a joke and didn’t kill him on the spot. Dreadnaught is not old! But joking aside I wasn’t going to sleep well tonight, or ever again if things were really this bad. # The following morning bright and early, well on a world it would have been but in space it was the same as every other time, cargo loading began. I supervised from my bed, another win for the link network. Loading the many pallets of cargo was easy. With gravity on the moon being only about 6% of standard I just turned off the internal grav field in the cargo bay and the containers were easy to float in. A single cargo drone could pick up two at once with its built in grav drive. Getting the Link fighters in was as easy, not because of anything I did. The bunch of show offs swooped in through the landing bay hatches in tight formation. The marine assault shuttles and the passenger boats landed in the upper shuttle bay on the titan hull, the door on that one was big enough for a full sized cargo shuttle, the comparatively small assault shuttles could fly in side by side and still have room to spare. Most of the passengers were military, a kit bag each and a convoy of follow me carts, the little grav floaters used everywhere to carry anything too big or heavy for people to want to lift. The problems started when the scientists came on board. I had a total of sixty cabins which my faithful drones had configured into to paired bunk beds using the memory alloy fold outs that made the cabins so versatile. But some of the scientists didn’t want to share, they wanted individual cabins because they were important. Then the Orcs arrived and it only got worse. The Orc scientist Shras had a ten Orc team with her, body guards or servants of some sort, it’s hard to tell since they all come with armour and an attitude. But they wouldn’t mix with the much larger Orc group that was attached to the security force. They wouldn’t say why, just refused point blank to mix. So I had forty one stroppy Orcs, 28 annoying scientists and three 12 person marine platoons plus an 8 person strike commando team plus all of the fighter and shuttle crews plus all of the ground crews and support staff for that lot. 200 people, plenty of room for 240 except that half of them were fussy about rooms. Why did I agree to do this? Oh yea, huge amounts of money and I was drafted. OK, Fighters and crews in the hanger bays, they could stay there for a few hours, we only had to move out far enough to safely jump so the entire trip would be a few hours tops, no one needed a cabin but try explaining that to the Orcs or egg heads. So it was quickly reconfigure some of the cabins into a single large bunk room for the Orc platoon, do the same on the other deck for the scientist and her Orcs. Marines to the passenger lounge though if they were doing much sitting down in my furniture I would bill for the damage. Marine battle suits are one ton power armour units with heavy armour, grav drives and weapons. I didn’t think my chairs would survive but right now I didn’t care. Ok cargo loaded, fighters all loaded, shuttles loaded, marines in the lounge, scientists and Orcs all happy now they have cabins. Everything sorted. That was when the Staff Captain arrived with his staff and wanted to know when his cabins would be ready. How in the fiery pits did this lot win the war, oh right they didn’t. People like me did, this lot were the idiots that arrived post war. Finally everyone was in place and I opened a comm the base to be greeted by one clearly impatient Admiral. “Are you.” He paused dramatically. “Finally ready to leave?” I think so, I may have forgotten something, I think we have everything loaded. Did you check the base cargo bay to see if there was anything left there? He started turning an interesting shade. Nope, I think we got everything. Permission to take off commodore? That shade of red could not be healthy, maybe he should talk to a medical drone. He gave me clearance through gritted teeth and I told Dreadnaught to bring her sub light drives on line. We lifted off the landing pad carefully and slowly, nothing to do with not pissing of the admiral more, with all this cargo that goes bang on board I just didn’t want to bump into anything as we left. # To be safe I went out to a full million Km from the base. Not deliberately trying to drive the admiral into a heart attack, I was going to take this carefully. To be honest this new drive made me nervous. On station and it was time for the long range jump. Agincourt came up alongside and docked to the aft clamps and everyone was ready to go. Systems checks. Everyone report in. Engineering. Everything green here. Power. At 100%. Drives. Manoeuvre drives on standby, jump drive at full power. Shields. Battle shields at full power, jump shields powered and ready. Sensors. I’m active, nothing to report. Communications. Everyone is listening. Primary weapons. Bored Secondary weapons. All point defence clusters powered and ready to rock. Navigation. Oh that’s me, Ok plotted now and ready to jump. The Procyon was spun up to full power, the modifications were working as the pulsing was being smoothed out. The combined subspace shield looked fine. I dipped my thoughts into the drive and plotted the jump, but it was difficult, it was a Procyon drive and like moulding wet noodles into a three dimension shape but as I set the distance it was almost as if the drive was trying to slither out of my control. It was almost, no that was ridiculous, the drive could not be fighting me. It couldn’t be trying to avoid jumping the last part, through the nebula. That would suggest the drive was somehow, aware, able to resist me. Then suddenly everything was ready, in an instant the resistance was gone, like I had imagined it. Course plotted, navigation confirmed. Jumping. # The Portal drive pulsed and we jumped. Into subspace. For almost a second we were nowhere and everywhere. Our bodies, our minds compressed into nothing and stretched across the verse, every person experiences it differently. Exactly like every other Procyon jump I had ever done. Then we emerged from. . . . . What the fuck? Everything settled down mostly, but everything still felt strange, everything seemed to curve into the distance. The walls and floor seemed to stretch away from me, the ceiling seemed to ripple slightly. My ears were telling me one thing and my eyes another. Sounds seemed, wrong, like the atmosphere was thinner somehow, everything was tinny and echoed a tiny bit. I felt lighter or heavy or something. Jump duration 3.71 seconds. I looked around; others in the lounge were looking confused and not understanding, peering at monitors and each other as if they could find an answer. “Are we there yet? What’s going on? I don’t feel well.” From the fighter bay and the comm from Agincourt came a chorus of requests and demands to know what was going on. Seasoned pilots and spacers, they knew things had gone badly wrong. We were still in jump. Jump duration 31.35 seconds. Engineering, drives, sensors. What the fuck is going on, are we still in jump? Sensors reported chaos outside the shields. Temperature from absolute zero to the heart of a star and back, nothing in range and then collision alerts. Drives reported the Procyon drive was active and operating within normal parameters, the old fashioned computers in the forward Titan bridge were reporting we were 0.471 seconds into the jump but my Link components all reported we were now 119.5 seconds and ongoing. Engineering reported everything was nominal for a jump apart from the fact that we were all aware of it and time was completely screwed up. External sensor contact! What is it? Unknown but it is huge, in excess of 1,500km in length, also it is manoeuvring closer. On a collision course? No. It is moving as if it was matching our vector. Closing, now at 22,000km. Something is closing on us. In bloody subspace! There isn’t supposed to be anything in subspace, its subspace. How in the name of the fiery pits can something be moving to close with us in subspace? Wait drives, can we move away? Sub light propulsion is offline, we are in jump, I can bring them online and try to move but I have no idea what effect using Ion plasma drives will do here or even if they will have the slightest effect. No one has ever tried before. INTRUDER ALERT. UNIDENTIFIED LIFE FORM DETECTED. HANGER 7. Now what, is that a passenger who got lost? No, it is a very strange life form, temperature and energy emissions far too high for and human or Orc. It seems to be floating near the roof hanger bay, I have no visual scan, some sort of energy surge has taken out all the sensors in the bay. I am detecting it on ship wide internal sensors. INTRUDER ALERT. UNIDENTIFIED LIFE FORM DETECTED. HANGER 7. INTRUDER ALERT. MULTIPLE LIFE FORMS DETECTED. HANGER 7. Three more of them just appeared, it’s very strange they are literally appearing in an instant. Now there are five of them. Comm call hanger nine. Hey guys we have a serious problem. “We noticed! What the crap is going on, fighter sensors say we are in jump!” Yea, I know, when I understand what’s going on I’ll tell you. In the mean time I have five unidentifiable. . . . . Eight. OK make that eight unidentified and really weird life forms in the bay directly above you. They are floating directly above the connecting cargo lock at the back of the bay. You may want to keep an eye on it while I try to get some Marines down there for a looksee. “Shit. On it.” I heard him shouting to the other pilots and the ground crew and a quick glimpse on the hanger bay sensors showed every last one of them taking cover facing the aft cargo lift and readying pistols. I turned my attention back to the lounge to see the back of several marines running aft, primary weapons was directing things. Primary weapons may not have had any thing to fire but both of my weapons nodes were well trained and experienced in every form of combat and tactics. Primary weapons had issued orders to get a marine squad moving while I was still talking to the hanger deck. Everyone seemed to be confused but otherwise unharmed. Except. The admiral’s pet Orc was on the carpet, curled into a ball and making some sort of wordless groaning noise. What was that all about, maybe this affected Orcs in some strange way. No, the Orc warriors in the makeshift barracks were fine when I checked the cameras in their room; they were all standing and chanting something. What in the fiery pits was that about, it almost looked as if they were praying? I checked the other Orc quarters, the handful of Orcs that had come on board with the Admiral's pet were also curled up on the carpets. That’s all I need, the situation is going to crap and the Orcs are doing odd things. Sod them, ship and me first, Orcs last. Then the verse turned inside out and I was face down on the carpet with my guts heaving and my own vomit splattering onto my face and hair. I couldn’t stop myself, my whole body was shaking and through the link I felt wave after wave of nausea coming from every one of me. The whole lounge stank of vomit, everyone was down heaving up their guts. Jump emergence confirmed. Jump destination confirmed. Jump duration 0.937 seconds. I tried to take control of myself but my stomach kept cramping as I dry heaved again and again, my vision swam, my legs and arms were weak beyond belief, trembling and shaking. I couldn’t move. All I could hear from the other me’s was a confusion of voices, none of us could think or do anything. Then I heard a loud hiss and felt a sharp pain and a cold patch on my neck, suddenly my whole body was ice cold and burning hot at the same time. The shaking slowed, my arms and legs still trembled but all my pain had gone. Everything was bright and sharp and clear. “Are you all right captain?” I looked up to see the face of the marine units attached corpsman. He was holding a used injector of some sort. What. Yes. No. I’m fine. What. What did you? What was? “I gave you a full dose of combat stim. It’s designed to get a wounded marine up and moving again after critical injury. I’m sorry captain you don’t have the bioware to be able to handle the dose without some confusion but given the situation I used the best I had available. The feeling of confusion will wear off quickly.” I was feeling fine, no, I was feeling fantastic, run ten miles up a mountain, go for a swim outside the ship fantastic. Strong, powerful, unstoppable. Wow. That shit was great. The rest of me was still confused but getting better. Everything was still down but the computers in the forward bridge were still working so I had some sensor information. It felt strange having to use an implant to open a screen in my field of vision to actually look at a monitor image instead of me knowing what was going on with a thought. We had arrived exactly where we were supposed to be. Everything looked normal for having emerged from a jump. Apart from the fact that every single person in the room had just thrown up on themselves, the air stank of vomit, the carpets were probably ruined and we had just had one god dammed freaky and terrifying jump. |