Splinter Faction, page 14
“Of course,” I said. “But—why?”
He sniffed, looking around with a conspiratorial glance. “You see, ah, captain… Wulgor tend to be a little ripe.”
We made it back to Earth without incident. Perry got his damaged wing repaired, and the Fren engineer identified our star of interest, the one the former destroyer had transited through on its way to Wolf 424.
I looked at the system Netty had highlighted on the star chart she put up in the Fafnir’s crew lounge for our available crew. This was another of our super-secure intel items, so we kept discussion of it strictly inside the secure envelope of the Fafnir. “NTX-7845-A0, huh? Now there’s a name to conjure magic with. Let’s see, red dwarf, a few barren dwarf planets, some rocks, and that’s it. Totally nondescript.”
“That’s right,” Netty replied. “The only thing remarkable about it, in fact, is in the context of that destroyer’s travels. It’s needlessly out of the way for a waypoint nav fix between Dregs and Wolf 424. The only perk it offers is the opportunity to burn a little more fuel and lose a little more time to twist-related dilation.”
“Hmm. So they twisted through there for a reason.”
“Maybe it was just to avoid twisting through a busier system, one where they might have been spotted, even identified,” Torina suggested.
“Possibly, but there are at least twenty systems just as non-descript along the way, all of them more efficient for twist travel, and some of them much more efficient.”
“Which brings us back to them passing through that one for a specific reason,” I said, studying the chart. Nothing about that one system, which we’d agreed to simply call NTX, made it stand out in any way at all. It had no meaningful resources, no habitable planetary surfaces, no great stores of cometary water ice, and it wasn’t a good waypoint to anywhere—in other words, nothing of any real value or interest at all. It was just one of countless, unremarkable red dwarf stars that made up a huge chunk of the Milky Way’s stellar population.
Which, I suspect, was the point.
“Okay, this seems like a job for Rektorr and the Prowler. Netty, ask him to make a discreet trip to NTX at his earliest convenience, to see—just tell him to look close. To see what he can see.”
“Like the bear,” Perry put in.
We all looked at him.
I put my hands on my hips. “Perry, what the hell are you talking—?”
“The bear. You know, the bear went over the mountain? The kid’s song? The bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see, and what do you think he saw?”
Silence. Rab finally snapped, “Well?”
“Well what?”
“What did he see?”
“A 1993 Porsche 911 Speedster, Rab. Sheesh, I said it’s a children’s song. He saw the other side of the mountain—” Perry sighed and shook his head. “My wit is lost on you people.”
Rab sighed with the weariness of an adult. “That’s for sure.”
We had more good news. Great news, in fact. The Garbo was back.
That was the great news. Icky, Netty-P, and Dalsi, the geologist who’d discovered the promethium in the first place, were all back, safe and sound.
And their mission had been a success, which was also great news. Safely secured in the Garbo’s hold was nearly thirty kilograms of high-grade promethium. It was radioactive, emitting gamma rays and beta particles like all get out, so we could only look at it remotely, through an imager. In the gloom of the hold, it was haloed by a faint, diffuse blue glow of Cherenkov Radiation.
I stared at the otherwise unremarkable lump of silvery-gray metal. “Hard to believe that’s worth millions of bonds.” I turned to Icky, Netty-P, and Dalsi. “Did you guys have much trouble recovering it?”
Icky shook her head. “Nah, not really. The excavator only had to dig for about an hour to get at it. We recovered as much as we could—probably about, oh—” She looked at Dalsi.
“I’d estimate we recovered about ninety percent of what was there,” Dalsi said. “The remainder was too disseminated through the host rock to make recovery worthwhile.”
I smiled. “Probably a million bonds or so left behind, then. And that’s not worthwhile, huh?”
She made a face. “Not when you’re trying to do it secretly, with League warships prowling not too far off.”
“Ah, point taken.” I looked at Icky and Netty-P and raised an eyebrow. “League warships? Were they suspicious or something?”
“I don’t think so,” Netty-P answered. “I think they were more interested in pirates trying to prey on traffic entering and leaving the Delta Pavonis system.”
“We had one hairy moment,” Icky put in. “A League destroyer passed a few million klicks off, lit up like one of those Christmas trees in Frankenmuth with active scanners. Turns out the Garbo’s stealth is that good. Or, at least, I guess it is, since we’re, you know, having this conversation right now.”
“Well, good work, guys. I did a trip on the Garbo myself, so I know it’s not very pleasant,” I said.
Dalsi gave Icky a significant sidelong glance. “It was a trial. There was… a lot of sweating. A lot of it.”
Icky gave a self-conscious smirk, then gave Netty-P a mock glare. “Yeah, Netty-P. What’s up with that?”
Netty-P shrugged. “Sorry, I guess I forgot to turn off the moist function on my alloy and composite chassis.”
“The important thing is that the autocratic oligarchs running the League didn’t get their hands on it,” Dalsi said, then frowned. “I just can’t even imagine how this deposit of promethium even formed. There’s no known geological or geochemical process that could concentrate so much of something that should only occur in trace amounts in nature.”
“Well, you’ve got access to the stuff whenever you need it, to study it,” I said. “At least, for the next, oh, hundred and eighty years or so, by which time there’ll be, what, only about one-thousandth of it left?”
Dalsi nodded. “About that. A half-life of eighteen years, ten half-lives—which only heightens the mystery. How is so much of this stuff even left? A half-life of eighteen years is—well, it’s nothing, in the big picture.”
“A geological puzzle for you to unravel, my friend,” I said to her. “In the meantime, I’ll get Netty to call up Dayna Jasskin and let her know that we’ve got our reserve. Now, we just need a bank.”
With us back, Perry fixed, the mysterious star NTX identified and Rektorr on his way to check it out, I was left with one last thing—Alexander Hawkes.
I drove to meet with him in Elkader, while Perry took flight to confirm the functionality of his new wing. He beat me there, sitting atop the bed and breakfast where Alexander was staying when I arrived. I parked the car, got out, and looked up at him. He stared imperiously down at me and spoke a single word.
“Nevermore.”
I shook my head. “Nowhere near as portentous on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, bird, sorry. There’s a reason, you know, Poe didn’t set The Raven in a beach house in Miami.”
“Hey, I can only work with what I got.”
We entered and met with Alexander. The meeting was brief and to the point—we had to go to Dregs. He gave me a thumbnail overview of why, with an assurance we’d discuss the matter in more detail on the way.
“The important thing is that we get there as soon as possible,” he said. “The man we need to meet is there but may not stay there. And I don’t want to have to track him down again.”
I agreed. “We’ll take the Frankie.” I checked the time and agreed to pick him up on the edge of Elkader in two hours.
Perry rode back to the farm with me. As we crossed the bridge over the Turkey River in brooding silence, I glanced at him, where he stood on the passenger seat. “Perry, do you believe him?”
“I do. Or, at least, I believe he believes he’s right. And before you ask, yes, he really is who he says he is. That part I do absolutely believe.”
“The First Peacemaker.”
“That’s right.”
We drove in silence for a moment.
“What about the claim he’s making? About the missing stars? Do you think he’s right about that?”
Perry turned his amber gaze on me. “Oh, I certainly hope not.”
Unfortunately, I had to do something I hated. . .again. I had to lie to my crew.
And my wife.
I considered just telling them I had a reason to go to Dregs that I just couldn’t talk about, but that would make them want to talk about it. And, in light of my being all closed-mouthed about Alexander to begin with, I doubted I’d get away with just dissembling some more. I certainly wouldn’t get away with it with Torina. Unless I could provide another reasonable explanation for why I had to make a sudden trip off-world in the Frankie, she and the others likely wouldn’t let the matter go. They’d worry about me being alone on the Frankie with Perry, lacking backup and flying in a capable but small ship. We’d outfitted the Frankie with some potent weapons, but she was a far, far cry from the combat power of the Fafnir.
Perry came to my rescue. He put in a discreet call to Candler, who then contacted me and not at all discreetly told me I had to get to Anvil Dark ASAP to deal with an important, complicated, and above all, tedious administrative matter. That allowed me to decide to go to Anvil Dark with Perry via the Frankie, which didn’t really raise eyebrows at all. Anvil Dark was a safe and easy destination, and I’d made the trip in the Frankie many times before, often with Perry in tow. The reason? Actual important, complicated and tedious administrative matters that my crew were quite happy to avoid. They were just as happy to avoid this one, so that solved that.
But what a tangled web and all that. Perry and Netty-P had to conspire to alter the Frankie’s flight logs and have the Created Person overseeing traffic control further alter the Nexus scanner data so that I wouldn’t be recorded as making a stop outside Elkader before traveling off-planet. The traffic controller was happy to oblige, recognizing that sometimes data had to be altered for operational security reasons, and didn’t ask any questions.
Still, by the time we lifted, I was feeling pretty shitty. I was implicated in deception to hoodwink my own crew and my wife, in altering flight logs and scanner data, and just generally being all sorts of shady to people who should be able to trust me implicitly. The only thing that made it at all palatable was that the full truth was exponentially more awful. Potentially exponentially more awful, anyway. The kind of awful that might spark unease, unrest, or even outright panic.
That might even trigger interstellar conflict.
So, until we knew for sure that potential was actually real—which was the whole point of this trip—I didn’t want to discuss it with anyone. Not my crew, the other Masters, or even my wife. They just didn’t need to know, and they sure as hell wouldn’t want to know, until we confirmed it one way or the other. Not yet. And that meant that lying, deception, and forgery were the order of the day, no matter how odious I found it or shitty it made me feel.
Sometimes, command feels a lot like losing a part of your soul. The key is to protect what’s left over.
13
I returned from Dregs two days later. The Frankie’s flight records showed a trip to Anvil Dark and back, the Anvil Dark traffic control records showed the arrival and departure of the Frankie, and station logs showed me entering and leaving my office in the Keel a number of times. The station security logs even archived images of Perry and me moving around the station. And it was all just carefully crafted falsehoods.
We left Alexander on Dregs. He apparently had other business there. I talked to him aboard the Frankie before we parted ways.
“So that’s it. Now we just wait,” I said.
He nodded. “Now we wait.”
“It might be months before we hear anything.”
He nodded again. “Many months, I’d imagine.”
His casual, almost offhanded matter-of-factness made me shake my head. “How can you be so—so blasé about this?”
His solemn gaze met mine. “Oh, I’m not, Van. Not at all.” He handed me a data chip. “This is encrypted. You can decrypt it with the following key, used the same way as the Charge of the Light Brigade.” He cleared his throat. “Of Man’s First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste brought Death into the World.”
“That’s… cheery.”
“No, it’s not. It is the beginning of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and little about that epic work is cheery. But it is appropriate. Regardless, the chip contains the routing data necessary to contact me via twist-comm. It will only be usable once.”
I glanced at Perry, who shrugged his wings. I turned back to Alexander. “You’re really into this cloak-and-dagger stuff, aren’t you?”
He started turning to the airlock but turned back. “Yes, I am. It has kept me alive—well, for a very long time now. I’d like that to continue. Anyway, Van—we will speak again.”
“I’m sure we will.”
He left, and Perry sealed the airlock behind him. I stared at it for a moment, then sighed and turned to the flight controls. “Okay, bird. Let’s go home.”
No one was the wiser. I said hello to my crew and to Torina, they asked a few rote questions about the trip, and that was that. In other words, I’d got away with it.
Yay me.
But there was nothing more I could do about the matter that had taken me to Dregs with Alexander in the first place, so I did my best to shove it out of my mind and just get on with more immediate concerns. And that was easy, because Rektorr had returned from NTX. Instead of delivering his intel report via twist-comm, though, he brought the Prowler right to Earth.
“I know you’re particularly security-conscious these days, Van, especially around the Stillness,” he said, when I met him aboard the Prowler, grounded alongside the Fafnir. It was strange seeing the sleek, stealthy reconnaissance ship in the Solar System, much less right here at the farm. I squeezed myself into the cramped galley, which had been repurposed by Rektorr into a workspace. He was an Usu, so he didn’t have to eat. I’d brought Perry and Torina along, both of whom muttered darkly about the cramped confines of the ship.
“Hey, it’s fine when it’s just me aboard,” Rektorr said as we tried to settle in without stepping or sitting on one another.
“Yeah, well, it’s not just you aboard, is it?” Perry shot back, trying to keep his razor-sharp wings away from Torina and me. “We couldn’t have done this aboard the Fafnir?”
“I’m not letting these data leave the Prowler until Van sees them,” Rektorr said, then activated a display over the galley table. It was an image of a red dwarf star, obviously NTX. But far from the lonely, empty system I’d expected, there were ships. At least one orbital. And a small shipyard.
Torina and I gaped at the images, and the succeeding ones Rektorr cycled across the display. They were long-range surveillance images from the Prowler’s powerful passive scanner suite, and they showed more ships, more and different angles on the orbitals, and the shipyard.
Perry spoke. “Well, holy shit.”
“Holy shit is right. You sure you didn’t accidentally collect some imagery from Spindrift or Crossroads?” Torina asked. “Because this sure as hell doesn’t look like a remote, desolate red dwarf system.”
“No, it does not,” Rektorr agreed.
I took a deep breath, huffed it out. “The Stillness. They’ve got a base—a big and well-equipped one—just outside known space. Damn.”
We counted fourteen ships, including four large warships. Two of them were battlecruiser class. And they somehow seemed familiar. I had Rektorr cycle back to the images of them in particular. He nodded. “Yeah, I figured those would pique your interest. According to the archives, they’re—”
“Champion class,” Perry said. “We’ve crossed swords with them before, when we fought the Tenants.”
I snapped my fingers. I remembered the big, powerful ships from our battle against the then Seven Stars League fleet that had been co-opted by the parasitic organisms called Tenants. In other words, those were League warships. And not obsolete ones, either. There were still Champion-class battlecruisers in the current League fleet. They were frontline ships, still very much up-to-date.
“So the Stillness and the League are in—well, league,” Torina said. “Such cheerful news.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s it. Or not in the way you’re implying, that they’re willing allies. Like I’ve said before, I think that the Stillness have managed to infiltrate the League in some fundamental ways. They’re manipulating the League through proxies or puppets.”
“Aka Clynepses Ornitolian-Sprowse,” Perry said.
“Yeah, she’s the obvious candidate, but there may be others. In fact, I’m sure there are others. A really good question to eventually get answered is how they’re doing this, but right now”—I pointed at the image—“that takes priority. That’s a fleet. And with those two big bastard battlecruisers, it’s a powerful fleet. Each one of them is equal to the Righteous Fury, and she’s the most powerful ship we can count on—well, aside from the Schegith, or anyone else who might end up wanting to take our side, like the Eridani or the Ceti. But as it stands, this is a major threat.”
“The question is, what do we do about it?” Rektorr asked.
I sighed and scratched my head. “Well, the obvious thing to do would be to attack. But those ships—all of them, not just the two big guys—seem to be backed up by some serious static firepower.” I had Rektorr zoom in the image of the shipyard. It was lavishly equipped with big laser batteries, Invictus equivalents. I pointed them out, and more of them on the orbitals.
“Taken together, those represent another battleship-class worth of firepower,” Perry said. “Four times over.”
I sighed. A powerful mobile force built around two potent battlecruisers, and another four battleships worth of combat power based at NTX.
