Twilight Serenade, page 25
part #6 of Earth Song Series
“I don’t know if I agree that it needs to be you.”
They finished their dessert in silence, then Aaron helped clear the table and do the dishes. They didn’t speak again until they were sitting on the porch, under the stars. She’d dug another wooden recliner out of the storage shed after they’d married. Like hers, it had been made by Mindy Harper’s husband 500 years earlier, and Minu thought it might have been his own.
“We haven’t had many arguments in our years together,” Minu said as they watched the dark disk of Remus race behind the blue-green circle of Romulus.
“Only a couple,” he agreed.
“I don’t want this to turn into an argument. I can’t order you to go, and I wouldn’t, even if I could. I see your point about taking Mindy. Every fiber of my being wants to, but it makes more sense to leave her here, with you. I’ll only be gone a few weeks.”
“That’s a long time for an infant.”
Minu looked away and sighed. “You’re not making this any easier.”
“It shouldn’t be easy.” Minu stared off into the night. Somewhere, a few howlers were barking at each other, but they could barely be heard over the songs of the night birds. The ecology was continuing to change.
“I need to go,” she said.
“I understand,” he said, then he got up to go inside. “Mindy and I will wait here.” He stopped and leaned over to kiss her on the forehead before closing the door behind him.
Minu stayed outside until Remus disappeared behind the house, and Romulus was well into the night sky. Even though he was her husband, she was the First, and she didn’t want him to see her crying.
* * * * *
Chapter 32
Julast 22nd, 535 AE
Planet Midgard, Aether System, Galactic Frontier
The Kaatan slid into orbit around Midgard with Ibeens Alpha and Theta close behind. Four Eseel flew in close formation around them. Lilith had finally decided the tactical jump with the two Ibeen was an unnecessary risk, so they’d taken an extra day to move the transports through one at a time, carefully, with deliberation.
The flight from the arrival point in Aether’s system to Midgard was less than an hour, even at the plodding speed of the Ibeen. Minu floated in the CIC with Lilith. Most of one wall projected the space ahead of the ship and the orbiting planet, a dark and beautiful, monochromatic painting, on the other side.
As they orbited, the firebase came into view. When she’d left a month earlier, there were only a couple of ships docked at the firebase; now, there were dozens. Many were Eseel undergoing maintenance, but there were plenty of capital ships, as well. All the salvaged ships not crewed, except the hybrid Fiisk and the Guul, were there.
The Fiisk was orbiting just outside the stable jump point, sensors watching outward where a dozen Eseel drifted quietly. The Guul floated less than a kilometer from the firebase, two kilometers of metallic death dimly shining in Aether’s blueish light.
One of the Ibeen continued to the firebase, the other stayed in formation with the Kaatan as it entered a stable orbit. A shuttle arrived a few minutes later carrying Minu’s security detail.
“You should have known you couldn’t avoid me for too long,” Selain joked as his squad exited the shuttle.
“I wasn’t avoiding you,” she assured him.
“Where are Aaron and Mindy?”
“Back home,” she said, then promptly changed the subject. “Ready to head down?”
Selain cocked his head fractionally at her reaction, then he nodded. “Ready when you are, ma’am. Ranger teams have visited every settlement and industrial facility on Midgard. There is no evidence of any living, sentient beings on the planet. Furthermore, there are no predators larger than small dogs, and they are not interested in humans as prey.”
“Midnight Utopia,” Minu joked.
“Some of the men have taken to calling the planet Twilight, ma’am.”
Minu thought the name a little more fitting than Midgard, but what was done was done.
“Did you bring the shuttles?” he asked.
“As planned,” Minu said. She gestured at a wall and it became a display screen, showing the Ibeen behind them.
“You’ve learned some of your daughter’s tricks,” Selain noted.
“Some, yeah.” Minu showed him a tiny, crystalline bracelet she now wore. She gazed at it for a second, still not sure if she liked the idea. The People’s tech used Azure in everything.
As they watched, three of the Ibeen’s huge cargo balls split open. Four lines of new Phoenix shuttles emerged from each. They were shorter than the needle-shaped Kaatan shuttles but much wider with forward swept wings and considerable cargo capacity.
The shuttles quickly divided into groups. Some headed for the firebase or the planet, a pair flew farther out into the system, and one went to meet up with the Kaatan.
“What’s the plan, Boss?” Selain asked.
“I’ve got approval to start using Midgard as a base.”
“That’s excellent. Not as a colony?”
“Not yet. The Council wants to wait until after our meeting on Nexus. That will give us more time to research the issue of squatting on a world like this.”
“What kind of base are we starting?” he asked.
“One that looks an awful lot like a colony,” Minu said. Selain narrowed his eyes, and Minu winked at him, slowly and deliberately. He shook his head and chuckled.
The Phoenix docked a minute later, and Minu boarded with her detail close behind. Once inside, the pilot greeted them.
“Welcome aboard, First,” Chris Sommercorn said, saluting.
“Gonna take me a while to get used to that,” Minu said, returning the salute. “How was the crossing?”
“Boring,” Chris admitted. “The grazers aren’t much for conversation or entertainment. They spend most of their time flying around inside the empty cargo balls, practicing zero-gravity maneuvers and eating salads.”
“Exciting,” Selain said, shaking the four-star Chosen’s hand.
“We do the flying; you guys do the dying.”
“Screw you, Flyboy.”
“You two, play nice,” Minu said in mock seriousness.
“He’d better,” Chris said, “since I’m flying him down.”
“Hrumph,” Selain grunted. “I’d better head aft and see if there are any airsickness bags in this crate.”
The trip down was more energetic than it would have been aboard the ancient People’s shuttles. Those relied heavily on shields and gravitic drives during reentry to a planet’s atmosphere. The Phoenix, on the other hand, was more old school.
Its underside was a composite moliplas dualloy ceramic hybrid, invented by Aaron’s scientists, that could absorb and shunt away thousands of degrees of thermal buildup. Under that was a superconducting layer that kept the heat from transferring into the passenger area. Small gravitic thrusters on the wings, nose, and tail provided attitude control. The rest, as Aaron liked to say, was up to Sir Isaac Newton.
The Phoenix could make a hot entry, similar to a People’s shuttle, if necessary. However, that consumed power, and power was a valuable commodity to humans. Even though they had thousands of huge, ship-size EPCs in storage, they wouldn’t last forever, especially with a fleet of warships. So, the Phoenix just glided in.
Chris was an exceptional pilot, bringing them through the upper atmosphere with only a few bumps. Just ten minutes after departing from Kaatan, Chris piloted the Phoenix over the biggest city on Midgard. Perfectly flat plains went from horizon to horizon in every direction.
“The airfield is done?” Minu asked. As she was qualified on the shuttle, she’d pulled rank and grabbed the copilot seat. Chris’s copilot was riding in the unoccupied third seat that could be filled by a sensor operator, engineer, or gunner, depending on the mission.
“Must be,” Chris said as he pointed. Just outside the city, they could see a stretch of concrete extending out into the once perfectly symmetrical fields.
Minu examined the controls for a moment and tapped a few keys. She identified a navigational beacon and fed the approach vector to Chris. He grunted and locked in the approach.
“They’ve been busy,” Minu said with a nod of approval.
Chris brought them around in a series of wide, sweeping turns, expertly bleeding off speed until they felt a shudder, indicating the shuttle had dropped below the speed of sound, just as he finished his final turn to line up with the long strip of ceramic concrete.
“Well done,” Minu said.
“Thanks, First. Your husband sat in on my Phoenix qualifications. He said I was a natural.”
If Aaron had given the kid that kind of compliment, he was likely an impressive pilot.
Chris gave the shuttle another notch of flaps, getting the feel for the slightly thinner atmosphere. The generation of Phoenix he flew was designed to operate on worlds with only 22% of the atmospheric pressure of Bellatrix. Midgard had 96%, so he hadn’t trimmed out the wing length.
The edge of the concrete shot by below him. Cross-hatched lines had been painted in infrared, reflective paint making them easy to spot in Aether’s hot glow. The shuttle’s belly radar chirped in increasing pulses, telling him how close he was to the pavement. Just as the pulses merged into a constant chime, he flared the shuttle out. It hovered along the runway just under 200 kph, then settled gently onto its wheels with a little squawk.
Minu nodded again. She could see where Aaron’s approval came from. Chris handled the Phoenix like he’d been born behind the controls.
“How are you in space?”
“Space is easy,” the pilot said, glancing over at her with a wink. “You don’t have to worry about storms or foreign objects.”
Chris used the joystick to steer them off the runway and onto the taxiway, just as another Phoenix pulled onto the runway. Minu made a mental note to double the runways.
In a minute, they taxied up to the terminal/warehouse complex. It was a new, pre-formed facility put up by bots.
The doors to the terminal opened, and several Rasa and Beezer exited. A group of Rangers followed closely behind, led by Captain Page. Chris got up and opened the passenger doors as Minu headed back. A dozen human specialists waited for her to pass. The frigid air of Midgard was less of a surprise than the first time, and it smelled like a farm.
Minu looked out the door and saw Bad Cold standing with a group of equally-high-ranking Beezer.
“Greeting, Minu Groves,” he grumbled, adding a bow and a flourish. “We are amazed by your new world!”
“We are unsure if we can legally claim it,” Minu said. Her personal squad dismounted and formed a casual perimeter around her. Minu wished they’d back off a bit, especially here.
Bad Cold looked around, up and down, back at the buildings, and at the runways. The whine of another Phoenix’s gravitic impellers sounded as it passed nearby on the way to the warehouses. Then he looked back at her.
“This looks like ownership to us!”
“What is your stance on our occupation?” Minu asked as she walked down the shuttle’s built-in ramp.
“We are keen to be involved in your plans,” he said in his language. It was like listening to rocks rolling down a muddy hill. “If some of those plans bend a Concordian rule or two, so be it.”
“Only bend?”
The Beezer coughed and made a sound like a charging kloth. It had to be laughing, Minu decided.
“It is past time someone upset the natural order, and it seems humans have a talent for altering the way things are intended to go.”
Minu shrugged, and he laughed again.
“It will be interesting to see what happens.”
I’m sure of that, Minu thought as Captain Page stopped and saluted.
“Report, Captain?” she asked as she returned the salute, struggling not to laugh at the act.
“We completed the orbital training cycle last week, so we transferred groundside, and I’m taking the opportunity to train the company in alien environments. They’re in the Misty Mountains on a two-day survival hike right now.”
“Misty Mountains?”
“Yeah,” she said and produced a tablet. The captain called up an orbital map and showed Minu all the features that had been named. Her Chosen had been busy. The mountain range next to the industrial city was labeled Misty Mountains, and the city was named Moria. She hoped they hadn’t named anything Mordor.
“Good call on the training. Any injuries?” Minu asked.
“We had two that could not acclimate to microgravity,” she said. “We made a note in their files and transferred them back to gravity until we returned planetside.”
“Sounds like you’re managing well,” Minu told her. “I’ve talked with Ken Benedict, our Head of Training. We’re going to send in battalions of Rangers for training, and that will also ensure we have a standing force here.”
Capt. Page glanced at the Phoenix then up to space where the firebase orbited.
“That’s going to take a lot of trips.”
“Not necessarily,” Minu said with a wink. The captain cocked her head, but Minu gave her no further details.
Inside the terminal building, Minu found Cherise waiting. She smiled and held her arms out.
“What do you think of the place?” Cherise asked as the two embraced.
“You’ve busted your asses!” Minu responded.
“The bots did a lot of it, and the Beezer were invaluable. We had to work with the computer systems a bit. They all use the same code script as the Kaatan, but none of it locked. Damned turnkey colony.” Cherise looked around. “Where’s my goddaughter?”
“Home with Aaron,” Minu said. Cherise easily caught the tension in her friend’s voice. “The Council didn’t approve outright colonization,” Minu continued, and Cherise’s face darkened. “Even your proxy wasn’t enough.”
“Fools,” Cherise grumbled.
Minu shrugged. “We are technically squatting. And the Concordia won’t take it well.”
Cherise passed her a tablet outlining the progress on the groundside installations.
“Once we’ve been to Nexus,” Minu continued, “they’ve agreed to revisit the issue. Part of the problem is that, as long as the Tog are responsible for us, anything we do wrong can be taken out on them.”
“It’s still short sighted,” Cherise growled. “I read the same laws you did. There isn’t anything about undiscovered worlds.”
Minu gestured out the panoramic moliplas window installed on one side of the main promenade. “Looks pretty discovered to me.” Hundreds of buildings were visible, even from the low height of the spaceport.
“There’s nothing in the Concordian registry of planets,” Cherise pushed.
“Nothing for almost 100 light years,” Minu agreed, “and the closest are unusable star systems.”
“The Lost sure could pick a hideout.”
“We’ll just go with ‘Big Ass Base’ planet,” Minu said, eliciting a snort of amusement from Cherise. Minu continued scanning the work Cherise had overseen.
“Is this right?” Cherise asked. “Seventy-nine billion bushels of hybrid wheat in inventory?”
“That’s only what we’ve inventoried so far,” Minu said.
“I hope you brought me some more staff,” Cherise said darkly. “It’ll take me the rest of my life to do this by myself.”
“No, there wasn’t time.”
“Boss!” Cherise whined.
“Don’t fuss, they’ll be here shortly.”
“But it takes weeks round trip, even in Lilith’s little speedball. And she can only carry a few dozen at a time. I requested several hundred staff, Chosen and civilian.”
“That won’t be a problem.”
Cherise looked at her skeptically. Minu replied by reaching into her pocket and showing Cherise what it contained.
“What’s that?” Cherise asked. Minu waggled her eyebrows, annoying Cherise.
“Is the special building I asked for ready?”
“Sure,” Cherise said. “You and your mysteries. Kal’at is there waiting for us.”
A brand new aerocar waited outside. Minu looked at it in surprise as Cherise opened the door for her.
“You don’t like surprises?”
“I wasn’t expecting this,” she said. “Where did you find it?”
“The factory at Moria,” Cherise explained. “It’s fully operational, with an open format configuration. We brought down a few component blocks using a pair of Eseel gunboats and gravitic tractors. We lost control of one, so there’s a new crater not far from Moria.”
Minu gawked for a second.
“The CI from the Fiisk helped us figure it out. Later shipments went fine.”
The flight was quick, with Cherise’s capable piloting. They flew over the mostly quiet city, giving Minu a chance to look at its layout—concentric circles with radiating avenues, like most of the bigger cities in the Concordia. Except in those cities, the central square would have been a portal spire. Here, there was nothing. It was as if the builders had copied an existing design and left out the spire.
“Where’d they build it?” Minu asked.
“Well there weren’t many open areas. We had some trouble with the airport, actually. The Rasa techs bulldozed the land one day. When they came back the next morning, agricultural bots were replanting the fields.”
“Stubborn robots,” Minu laughed.
“Yeah, it took a while to figure out how to stop them from undoing everything we did. Kal’at finally found the planetary central command. It’s in a deep bore bunker, just like on Bellatrix.”
“I wonder how many Concordian worlds have them?” Minu thought aloud.
“Anyway, we decided to use the central square.”
Minu looked at the central square and saw a large dome. She chuckled at the irony of their location choice.
As they came around to land, Minu could see several more aerocars and a couple of heavy duty aerotrucks. She also saw a few Beezer and a bunch of Rasa. It looked like most of Kal’at’s scientific team. Everyone looked up as Cherise’s aerocar landed.
