To Challenge Heaven, page 1
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For Sharon and Sheelah, the ladies in our lives
I
THE WAY OF HONOR
PUNS RELENTLESS,
SHONG SYSTEM,
241.5 LY FROM EARTH,
APRIL 7, YEAR 41 TE.
“I find myself, as I rather suspect you expected, surprised to see you,” Vlad Drakulya said.
“No! Really?” David Dvorak smiled as he extended his hand to the man history knew as “Vlad the Impaler.” Among other things.
The boat bay gallery in which they stood was somewhat larger than the one Vlad had left behind aboard the dreadnought Târgoviște. Not unreasonably, perhaps. Târgoviște, which Vlad had captured from the Imperial Shongair Navy four decades earlier, was over five kilometers long … but that was barely twenty percent of the Planetary Union Navy ship Relentless’s length. What was surprising—aside from the fact that the Planetary Union hadn’t existed when Vlad left the Sol System—was that, despite the absence of any spin section, the boat bay’s up and down were as firmly established as they would have been on the surface of Earth itself.
A half dozen or so men and women—and three other … beings—stood behind Dvorak in that obviously artificial gravity. Most of the humans wore military uniforms, although not that of any military which had existed when Vlad left Earth, and all of them smiled in obvious amusement as he and his companion took in their surroundings.
The nonhumans among them weren’t equipped to smile.
“Whyever should you be surprised?” Dvorak continued. “I mean, be reasonable, Vlad! You did leave a planet full of humans with the entire tech base of the Galactic Hegemony. What did you expect us to do with it?”
“Obviously, very much what you did do,” Vlad replied, shaking the proffered hand, “although you appear to have applied rather more … vigor to the process than I had anticipated.”
Dvorak chuckled and extended his hand in turn to the very tall, very black, former-Marine who had followed Vlad from the shuttle into the boat bay.
“It’s good to see you, too, Stephen,” Dvorak said, gripping his hand firmly. “Your dad and mom asked me to tell you they miss you.”
“You told them about me?” Stephen Buchevsky sounded much less amused than Vlad had, and his eyes darkened.
“I did.” Dvorak met those dark eyes levelly, still gripping his hand. “I know you didn’t want them told you were a vampire. Things changed, though, and you know I never liked lying to your dad, even by omission, about that. And before you get too bent out of shape people’s attitude about the vampires is one of those things that have changed—changed one hell of a lot—since you left.”
Buchevsky looked at him for several more of Dvorak’s breaths—Buchevsky didn’t breathe anymore—and then released his hand.
“All right.” He still wasn’t happy about it, but he nodded. “I wish you hadn’t. But maybe things have changed enough for them to handle it. I hope to hell they have, anyway.”
“Believe me, they have.” Dvorak laid a hand on Buchevsky’s shoulder and squeezed. “That’s why Pieter and Dan both agreed I should tell them. So did Jasmine, for that matter.”
“Even Jasmine?” Buchevsky’s lips quirked. “I’m starting to feel ganged up on!”
“But only in the friendliest way!” Dvorak assured him.
“Yeah. Sure!” Buchevsky drew one of the deep breaths he no longer really needed. “Dad … took it okay?”
“He not only ‘took it okay,’ his sermon the next Sunday was about the mysterious and miraculous ways God moves to achieve his purposes, and he used you as an example.” Dvorak smiled as Buchevsky’s eyes widened. “Not much worried about the ‘vampiric taint,’ your dad. And he and your mom also asked me to tell you they look forward to seeing you again a bit sooner than you probably anticipated.”
“I guess ‘a bit sooner’ is probably one way to put it.” Buchevsky shook his head with a smile of his own, obviously grateful for the opportunity to change topics. “Just how much ‘sooner’ did you have in mind, though?”
“Well, when we say ‘a bit,’ we mean ‘quite a lot,’ actually.” Dvorak’s smile segued into what could only be described as a grin. “The monkey boys and girls came up with a new way to break into phase space, and we can go a lot higher than the Hegemony.”
“How much higher?” Buchevsky asked.
“Gamma bands … for now,” Dvorak replied, and watched Buchevsky’s eyes widen. The phase-drive aboard Târgoviște, which represented the Galactic Hegemony’s best hardware—as of eighty years or so ago, which wasn’t even yesterday yet for the Galactics’ glacial approach to technology—could break only into the upper reaches of the alpha bands, which allowed them a maximum apparent velocity of a little more than six times the speed of light, and explained why it had taken forty years for Târgoviște to reach the Shong System from Sol. But if Relentless could go as high as gamma.…
“That means you can pull damned near twenty lights!”
“A tad over twenty-four, actually, because the Gannon Drive doesn’t need particle screening.” Dvorak’s expression would have filled the Cheshire Cat with envy. “We can get all the way up to point-niner-niner cee, nineteen percent better than anything the Puppies or the Hegemony can pull. We dialed that down a bit, though. We didn’t need that much speed to beat you guys here, and it seemed like a good idea not to push things to the max on our very first extended gamma-band voyage. So we held it down to twenty-two cee. Made the trip in just over twelve years. Well, a smidge under six, subjective. If we had pushed it all the way up to point-niner-niner, we could’ve done it in just over ten years … and only fifteen months, subjective.”
“Gannon Drive?” Buchevsky repeated in a rather shellshocked voice.
“The actual official name is the Gannon-Jackson-Nesbitt Drive, but shorthand—” Dvorak shrugged. “Chester gets a little pissed with us over that, but Warren Jackson and Trish Nesbitt are fine with it. They insist he did most of the heavy lifting.”
Buchevsky opened his mouth again, then closed it firmly before he could parrot the names of people he’d never met.
“Look, the Gannon Drive’s only one of the things we need to bring you guys up to speed on. Why don’t we take the two of you to the flag briefing room where we can talk about that. Among other things.”
“Quite a few other things, I suspect,” Vlad said, glancing at nonhumans in the greeting party.
Their heads were distinctly saurian looking, with high, pronounced crests covered in a fine down, and they were built on a lean, slender model. They appeared to be toe-walkers, and although those heads were shaped quite differently, they reminded him strongly of the velociraptors from one of his favorite science fiction movies. All of them were at least twenty centimeters shorter than he, which made them over thirty centimeters shorter than Dvorak or Buchevsky, but two of them were noticeably taller than their companion.
“Oh, definitely,” Dvorak told him. “Definitely.”
* * *
THE INTRA-SHIP CAR ride was quite a bit longer than it would have been aboard Târgoviște. But it came to an end eventually, and Dvorak led the way down a softly lit passage. A brown-haired uniformed woman, her sleeve bearing the single rocker and three chevrons of a staff sergeant, stood post outside it and braced to attention as they approached.
“Annette,” Dvorak said with a nod.
“Good morning, Mister Secretary,” the staff sergeant replied.
“‘Mister Secretary’?” Buchevsky repeated with a quizzical expression.
“It’s a long story,” Dvorak replied.
“Secretary of what?” Buchevsky asked.
“State,” a voice said from the rear of their party before Dvorak could answer.
“Secretary of State?” Buchevsky said in a careful tone.
“Yes,” Dvorak sighed, and turned his head to glare over his shoulder. “Gee, thanks, Rob!”
“What I’m here for,” the voice assured him, and Dvorak rolled his eyes, then looked back at the staff sergeant.
“Open her up, Annette. And if you could just sorta shoot your commanding officer as he goes by, I’d take it as a personal favor.”
“Sorry, Mister Secretary. No can do.”
The staff sergeant tapped the smart screen to open the door and Vlad and Buchevsky followed Dvorak through it, then came to an abrupt halt.
“Well, there you
“Don’t believe her,” her husband said. “We actually only got here a month or so before you did.”
“Which still represents a stellar, if you will pardon the adjective, accomplishment,” Vlad replied, returning Sharon’s embrace a bit cautiously.
She’d been less than fully comfortable with the whole notion of vampires when he, Buchevsky, and the crew of Târgoviște departed the Sol System. Any hesitance she’d felt then was clearly a thing of the past, now, as she opened her arms to Buchevsky, in turn.
“Well, we needed to catch up with you and explain how there have been … a few changes.” Dvorak waved toward the huge conference table at the briefing room’s center as his wife released Buchevsky. The table’s surface appeared to be a single enormous flatscreen, and names glowed on its surface, indicating which chair was whose.
“That much, I had already surmised … Mister Secretary,” Vlad said dryly as he and Buchevsky found their illuminated names and settled into the proper seats.
“Former Secretary,” Dvorak corrected.
His expression was a bit pained, and Vlad chuckled. The Dave Dvorak he’d left behind on Earth had been a wounded, ex–shooting range proprietor, part-time survivalist, resistance leader who would probably never use his left arm again. He’d also been at least a decade older, physically, than the man across the table from him, and he had not been the Secretary of State—well, former Secretary of State—of the Planetary Union, which had also not existed at the time of Vlad’s departure.
“I suppose,” Dvorak continued, seating Sharon before he took his own place, “that we should begin with introductions. Everyone here knows who you two are, but let me run through our motley crowd for you before we dive into any deeper explanations.
“These two, you already know.”
He waved at a squarely built red-haired man who bore a strong family resemblance to his wife and the smaller, more compact dark-haired man seated beside him. The name tape on the redhead’s black uniform tunic said “WILSON, R.,” although—like Dvorak himself—he looked substantially younger than he had when last Vlad and Buchevsky had seen him. The smaller man wore virtually the same uniform, but with what appeared to be different branch insignia. His name tape said “TORINO, D.,” and like Buchevsky and Vlad himself, he no longer breathed unless he needed the air for his vocal cords.
“Rob is back on active service now,” Dvorak continued, “and that monkey suit he’s wearing belongs to the Planetary Union Space Marines. Longbow here is still an Air Force wuss. Worse, those starbursts on his collar say he’s now a major general. And worse yet, Rob’s a lieutenant general.” He shook his head mournfully. “Oh, how standards have slipped in your absence!”
“Forgive him,” Lieutenant General Rob Wilson said. “He still thinks he’s clever, even after all this time and despite all evidence to the contrary.”
Vlad chuckled again and looked at the woman seated on Wilson’s far side.
“Admiral Josephine Mallard, Planetary Union Navy,” Dvorak said. “She’s the task force CO.”
Vlad took note of the words “task force”—and the implication Relentless was not alone—as he nodded to Mallard. The admiral was brown haired, brown eyed, and petite. There was nothing fragile about her wiry frame, and she carried herself with a springy, athletic grace. Despite her surname, she looked more Middle Eastern than European. Especially beside the taller, clearly Nordic officer in the same uniform sitting beside her.
“Captain Ignats Pavlovskis,” Dvorak said. “Relentless’s skipper and Admiral Mallard’s flag captain. The fellow sitting next to him in Marine uniform is Brigadier Branson Fitzgerald, Rob’s XO.”
Fitzgerald, a chunky dark-eyed and dark-haired man about midway between Dvorak and Vlad in height, nodded in respectful acknowledgment, and Dvorak moved on to the man beside the brigadier.
“Alex Jackson,” he said, “my chief of staff. He kept me from screwing up too badly on my first foray into interstellar diplomacy, so the President sent him along to keep an eye on me this time, too.”
Jackson was tall and almost as dark complexioned as Fitzgerald, although he seemed younger. Of course, all of the humans in the briefing room, including Dvorak, seemed preposterously young. Not one of them looked like he or she could be more than thirty. Obviously, Earth had figured out how to apply the Hegemony’s antigerone therapies to the human race.
“Seated next to Alex we have Fikriyah Batma, my official XO on the diplomatic side,” Dvorak continued.
“Prince Vlad.” Batma smiled. “I was Abu Bakr’s deputy on what Ambassador Dvorak’s fond of calling his first foray. Abu is … otherwise occupied at the moment, but he asked me to pass along his greetings. And thanks.”
“He is most welcome, of course,” Vlad replied.
“And beside Fikriyah,” Dvorak said, “is Bai Guiying. Guiying is with the Department of Industry, and she’s here to ride herd on the industrial side of our mission.”
Bai was obviously Chinese. She was also the only human in the room who was shorter than Sharon Dvorak, and unlike Admiral Mallard, she was fine boned and delicate, with an almost ethereal elegance.
“Salutări, Înălțimea Voastră,” she said, bending her head in greeting, and Vlad chuckled.
“Nǐ hǎo, huáitè fūrén,” he replied. “But while I appreciate the courtesy, I have not been ‘Your Highness’ in quite some time in any language.”
“I understand that, Prince Vlad,” Bai said serenely. “My mother, however, made me promise to greet you properly in your own tongue. She was visiting family in the United States when the Shongairi attacked us. She was only in her twenties at the time, and she lost her own mother and two brothers there … and all the rest of her family when the Shongairi K-struck Guangzhou. But she was also among those you and your fellows rescued from Ground Base Two Alpha.”
“I deeply regret my failure to act sooner,” Vlad said in a rather more somber tone, “but I am glad we were in time for her, at least.”
“You were ‘in time’ for a whole bunch of people, Vlad,” Dvorak said a bit sternly. “If you hadn’t been, none of us would be sitting here aboard this ship, because we’d all be too busy being dead!”
“I realize that.” Vlad nodded. “It does not mean I might not have saved so many, many more had I faced the necessity of once again embracing what I became so long ago.”
“Hold that thought,” Dvorak said. “I need to come back to it. But first, allow me to introduce the last three members of our group.” He gestured with an open palm to the first of the nonhumans in the room. “Major Merahl BryMerThor,” he said.
The kilted alien was perhaps thirteen or fourteen centimeters shorter than Vlad, with dark red crest down. He and his companions all wore rust-colored cardigan sweaters, despite the compartment’s comfortable—for humans, at least—temperature. They also wore kilts, not the uniform Wilson and the other humans wore, and unless Vlad was very much mistaken, those kilts’ blue-and-green pattern formed an actual tartan sett. Precisely why aliens might be wearing a human tartan was a bit of a mystery, but he was becoming accustomed to that.
They wore no shirts or uniform tunics, but the very edge of a diamond-shaped pattern of fine, red and black scales showed at the neck of the alien’s sweater as he rose slightly from his chair to bow across the table in response to the introduction.
“Captain Thornak BryMerThor,” Dvorak continued, and the second alien—this one a centimeter or so shorter, with yellow down and a banded black-and-yellow scale pattern—also rose to bow to Vlad and Buchevsky.
“And Captain Brykira BryMerThor.”
The third and smallest alien, with white down and a more muted chevron pattern of white-on-black scales, bowed in turn. They were, Vlad noticed, the only individuals in the compartment who were obviously armed, although the pistol grips looked a bit odd. Probably because their four-fingered hands were so slender compared to human hands—despite, he realized, having not one, but two opposable thumbs. That probably also explained why the magazine well was in front of the trigger guard, since the grips were too narrow and too short to accommodate much ammunition. Although it didn’t explain why they were armed. For that matter, unlike the human members of the group, Dvorak hadn’t explained why they were present in the first place.
