Imperial Gambit: Archangel One, page 12
*****
Chapter 13
NACS Odysseus, Flag Bridge
Eric Weston liked the calm.
The patrol had been one of the easiest they’d had in… well, since before the Block War if he were being quite honest with himself, but certainly in recent months. There had been no sign of the Imperial forces as they moved along the perimeter of the space claimed by the Priminae, which was a welcome relief for the moment.
Maybe they’ve decided it’s not worth the effort, he thought, an ironic twist of his lip following the thought almost instantly.
It wasn’t a likely thing, he knew. The Imperials he’d dealt with, both in combat and face to face as prisoners, were most assuredly not the sort who gave up.
If Earth and the Priminae wanted to this enemy to back off, Eric was certain that they would have to back them off.
Unfortunately, that was just the way some people were.
A warning sound from below the flag bridge caught his attention, derailing his thoughts as Eric moved forward so he could lean down and get a better view.
*****
Command Bridge
Miram turned in the direction of the sound almost on instinct, recognizing it as a proximity warning from the passive sensor array.
“Report,” she ordered crisply.
“Anomaly in the system, Captain.”
“Details?”
“Still isolating the data, Ma’am.”
Miram nodded, wishing she could rush that along, but the speed of light was a… mostly… unbreakable limitation… if she didn’t want to go announcing their presence to everyone for a few lightyears around, at least.
“Understood. Keep me apprized.”
She stepped back, half turning to glance over her shoulder, confirming what she’d already known, that the Commodore was watching intently. Miram suspected that he felt much as she did. This patrol had been too quiet, like the enemy was getting out of their way as they approached.
That almost didn’t make sense, honestly. The sheer volume of space they had to cover made it almost infinitely unlikely that they’d run into anyone in the first place, but things did tend to concentrate down to singular points as they reached key star systems…
Yet… there had been no signs in those systems either.
Miram didn’t like it, and she was fairly certain that the Commodore shared her feelings there.
Someone is playing a game, and we’re stuck waiting for them to make their move.
*****
Flag Deck
Eric looked over the data from the rest of the squadron. Each ship was now focusing on the anomaly they’d found and trying to pin it down, but for the moment all they had was what looked like a gravity source out of place with expected mapping passes. Not something that had to be enemy action, there were many things that could displace even planets from their predicted locations, but it was also one of the first indications of the presence of ships like the Odysseus.
A tap of his fingers sent out a command over the local Whiskernet, and in moments he saw the squadron following orders and spreading out slightly, keeping their scanners from being interfered with by the gravity fields generated by each ship’s cores.
Should we go active? Eric tapped a finger on the display in front of him, debating the question.
An active ping from the squadron would almost certainly settle the question very nearly instantly, but came with the obvious price of alerting any potential foes to their position.
A real concern, he knew, but not necessarily a valid one depending on the circumstance.
If it were a trap, then the enemy almost certainly were watching for their approach. The bow wake from a single cruiser could be detected several light minutes ahead of the ship itself while at speed, a squadron like the one they were travelling in? Considerably larger.
He'd have preferred to transition in and wait in place, gathering data quietly as light and other radiance from the system came to them, but there were obvious issues with that when they were caught traveling with ships that didn’t have that capability.
Ultimately, however, Eric moved his finger away from the display.
No. Not yet at least, let’s get in a little bit… closer.
*****
The Entity known to his… crew? Shipmates? He didn’t know which really fit, but they knew him as Odysseus, and he knew them as who they were. He examined the new feelings from the squadron and the system ahead, forming his illusionary form on the exterior hull of the big ship and shifting the focus of his consciousness into it.
The feel of interstellar space couldn’t be expressed in words. There was nothing even close in any human language he was aware of to get the concepts across, but there was a sensation of incredible… freedom that he felt every time he did this, moving outside the confines of the areas dedicated to keeping humans alive and just… existing there.
Odysseus was plugged into the gravitational scanners of the Odysseus at an almost instinctive level, and had access to the reports from each of the other vessels as well, giving him as complete a picture of spacetime as was possible to have… but he had more than that too.
Gravity, electromagnetic spectrum, the strong and weak forces of the universe… he experienced them all, on a personal level. It wasn’t something he’d been able to explain to his people; they didn’t have the words, the concepts, or the minds that could properly comprehend what he was experiencing…
Honestly, Odysseus didn’t have any of those things either… but what he did have was the experience. It was something he could compare to the times he’d done this before, and this time… there was something… new.
It isn’t a ship, not alone at least, Odysseus considered.
The anomaly was too large. Something had disrupted the system in far too significant a manner for it to have been caused by a single cruiser, even overloading its singularity in dangerous ways.
Lightspeed data was still flowing in, delayed only minutely as the information flooded through the dispersed array of the task group, was processed, and then redirected to the Odysseus for final compilation where he could read it.
His own… eyes, for lack of a better term, were far better than any humans because Odysseus intercepted and interpreted the light that entered into his sphere of control as a single action. Right from the start, that made his ‘eyeball’ the size of the gravitational influence of the ship itself, which was significant… though nothing compared to that of Gaia or Saul of course.
Similar to the other entities, the core that was in a very real way his body manipulated spacetime, creating a funnel that drew light and other things in. The well of his core, which expanded the effective size of his collecting method significantly.
For all that, however, the ranges involved at the moment were just too large and it was taking far too long to determine what exactly was awaiting them.
Odysseus considered briefly, then vanished from the hull of the ship as he returned inside.
*****
Eric didn’t look up from his work as he felt something change in the room, “Have something for me?”
“Uncertain,” Odysseus admitted.
Eric snorted, “That’s about the same as the experts across the task group. What do you have?”
The young entity, currently projecting his older armor and style, albeit with more tasteful makeup than he’d started with back when they met, stepped forward until he was just inside Eric’s peripheral vision.
“There is a significant mass anomaly in the system,” He said unnecessarily. “One that does not fit the profile for any ship, or combination of ships, available in the records. It seems… new.”
Eric grunted, “Cross reference known Drasin signatures and constructions.”
“No match,” Odysseus responded without a thought. “Though the Drasin could, in theory, cause such a shift, records indicate that they prefer to swarm with a relatively small number and self replicate within the system. Such an action would not significantly affect the mass distribution of a starsystem, as most of it would simply be resulting from the shifting of materials in one for to another.”
Eric grimaced, but nodded. The entity wasn’t wrong, he knew. Mars had been eaten by those goddamned things, leaving the former red planet to be replaced by the dying drones when they finally finished destroying the habitat they existed in, but that didn’t affect gravity within the solar system in any measurable way due to conservation of mass.
“What if they swarmed with larger numbers?” he posited, mostly hypothetically since he didn’t get that feeling from the data.
“Possible, however every indicator is that if they were in this region in such numbers, we would already have received reports of attacks and calls for help.”
Cold, but not wrong, Eric thought with a tip of his head.
“Well, something is out there,” he said. “This is a known and mapped system, which makes it unlikely it’s a construct like that of Prometheus. Imperial origin is still the most likely.”
Odysseus frowned slightly, cocking his head, “How so?”
“If it were us, or the Priminae, we’d have been told. A derelict like Prometheus should have been spotted ages ago,” Eric said. “And the Drasin aren’t subtle enough. Barring a complete unknown, I’m betting on the Empire.”
“I see…” Odysseus considered that before nodding, “Agreed. The trail of thought seems sound… barring unknown factors.”
“Can’t make decisions on things you don’t know about,” Eric said, tapping a command to open up a comm to his group commanders. “All ships, signal for General Quarters.”
As the order went out, Odysseus blinked slightly, “But what if an unknown factor is at play? We may be acting in the wrong manner.”
“We may,” Eric conceded. “But that doesn’t matter. You don’t always get the luxury of perfect knowledge, much of the time you have to make your decision based on the best intelligence you have now. That’s just how things work.”
“I… am uncertain that I like that.”
“NO one likes it,” Eric snorted. “But it’s true. There’s always a race going on, between information gathering and deciding, though, and if you’re not certain… it’s usually better to take action than sit around waiting.”
“…” Odysseus made an odd sound, one that Eric didn’t really have any reference to equate with, “Understood.”
The entity faded away, leaving Eric to his task.
Glad you do, that’s something even I’m still struggling with, son.
*****
Imperial Forward Division Cruiser, Scarbor Fershaw
“Inbound bow shock detected, Ship’s Commander. The enemy is closing on the system.”
“Understood. Ensure that all preparations are in place,” Ship’s Commander Brockaw Meld ordered as he shifted his focus from the administration tasks to the tactical situation.
“Yes, Commander.”
It’s about time. They’re running behind their normal schedule, Meld thought as he walked across the deck to observe the data feed. And they’re running far more noisily than normal as well. Something’s changed. I don’t like it.
The data was different from the normal pattern the Forward Division had been observing, almost… conventional, in fact, which would suit him neatly under most circumstances, but he certainly didn’t want to have new things thrown at him out of the blue like this right in the middle of his operation…
Not even if the new things are actually old ones.
The Empire’s current standing orders were harassment and attrition, bleed the enemy slowly, without doing so much as to goad them into using whatever superweapons they’d unleashed when pressed hard in the past.
The current assumption of Imperial Intelligence was that the weapon in question was either extremely difficult to bring to the field, or massively resource intensive. Otherwise, they’d have fielded it more by this point than just the two instances on record.
Meld was uncertain if that was the reason, but that was the point of pushing them a little at a time, to see when they would take off the gloves once more.
A risky strategy, of course, if they should be able to target a more valuable world or infrastructure, the Empire might lose a great deal… but doing nothing? Unthinkable.
The strategy was costing the Empire as well, of course, more so than the enemy it seemed. Whatever else this anomalous species was capable of, it was clear that they were superb warriors.
Meld would prefer not to find himself in the position of the Eighth, so he’d opted for a… different method of pursuing the enemy strategy.
Come on in, take the bait.
*****
NACS Odysseus
Eric didn’t like it.
Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to offer up much in the way of consolation. The compiled long-range data wasn’t showing them anything of utility, just that there was a distinct disruption in the system ahead, on that didn’t match any of their records and couldn’t be accounted for any known platforms.
He had experts throwing everything they had at the problem, hoping something would stick, but at the moment all he had was readings that made no sense.
The visual feed, still over three days old by this point due to their range from the anomaly, didn’t show a damn thing out of place.
Eric couldn’t explain it, and had no intention of taking his ships into that mess until he either could, or had a reason to.
“Squadron wide,” he ordered.
“Aye Commodore, you’re on.”
“All ships reduce speed, adjust course to sling around the system,” he ordered. “Standby for active scanning.”
The various vessels in the squadron responded in the affirmative moments later, and Eric very shortly felt the very slight shift in the gravity of the ship as they adjusted course.
It’s a trap, it almost has to be, but to what end?
“Get me the captain of the lead Begarim,” he ordered. “Captain… Boltain, I believe?”
“Yes sir, a moment,” his communications officer said. “Captain Boltain on the screen.”
“Commodore,” The Priminae Captain nodded in greeting, “How may I be of service?”
“This system, is it of any particular value I should be aware of?” Eric asked.
“I am not certain I follow your question.”
“The anomaly we’re scanning, there’s a fair chance that it’s a trap, but traps have bait, Captain. I’m trying to work out what the lure is here.”
The Priminae Captain leaned back, considering that, “You believe it to be a trap? Are you certain?”
“Certain? No, if I were certain then I’d know what to do,” Eric admitted. “I’m guessing, for the most part.”
“I see. This system is a resource system, Captain. A moment, if you please,” Boltain said.
Eric nodded agreeably. There was no reason to be pushing for anything at the moment since they had plenty of time before they’d even reach the system’s heliopause at the current rate, and he wasn’t planning on diving in anyway, not without good reason.
“Standby for a feed from my database,” Boltain said a moment later.
Eric just nodded to his communications officer and in a moment, they had detailed scans from within the system on their screens.
“The inner system is dominated by, I believe your people refer to it as a ‘Hot Jupiter’,” Boltain said., “A protostar, in essence, that was not quite massive enough to ignite, but has fallen very close to the system primary.”
“Yes, I see,” Eric said.
It was actually a very common stellar phenomenon, one that had actually been the very first extra-solar planetary discovery when astronomers began looking for planets in other systems in earnest. Being one of the easiest extra-solar planets to find, hot jupiters made up the bulk of early discoveries.
“Notice the gaseous plume between the protostar and the system primary,” Boltain said, highlighting the imagery in question.
“I see it.”
“This is an exotic plasma, one that can only exist in certain extreme environments,” Boltain said. “And one that can be mined and stabilized into power conducting materials. More importantly, it’s vital to converting the radiation from singularities into useable energies. It is the foundation of our laser systems, as well as almost all power transfers on ships.”
Eric nodded, “And there’s the bait.”
*****
Chapter 14
Imperial World Kraike
Imperial hospitality… wasn’t bad, as far as such things went.
Steph had endured worse, by any measure, though he’d also seen far better.
Doubt we’re in the real VIP suites, of course, he decided as he looked around.
Their environs weren’t exactly spartan, but they were far from the opulence he’d half expected when he bothered to think about it. The rooms were spacious, furniture reasonably comfortable and in good shape, no tacky gold or other ostentatious displays were in evidence… well, that he could see.
Thinking about it, though, Steph wasn’t certain that he could reasonably tell what was ostentatious given that he had so little context on the culture he was dealing with. For all he knew the walls were covered in some impossible to acquire material worth a fortune.
He was a little disappointed at the lack of serving robots or a replicator, though.
The back of his neck itched slightly where the device Gordon supplied was currently resting. He was all too aware that they only had a couple days charge on the thing, even with it’s auto-charging capacity. Any longer than that, and they’d probably find out the hard way if the Empire had a version of Central at the center of things.
The more he thought about that idea, though, the more it made sense.
Central was very much tied to the culture of the Priminae, unlike Gaia seemed to be by all indications. It was possible Gaia was playing them, of course, it would be damned hard to tell, but at the very least Steph knew that there was no all-knowing central computer on Earth that was regularly being referenced for information.
