Participant Species: Asher in Ordered Space Volume I Read online

  “Yes, Asher. And what’s more, our superiors are serious about it as well, I’d bet.”

  “So what am I doing here? What’s my role?”

  “Well, I think you’re probably our best bet for capturing ourselves two Cythrans without anyone else noticing.”

  ASher was taken aback. “What do you mean? How can I help with that?”

  “That’s easy,” said Jaydrupar. “We’re going to contact the Sissilbeni and ask them to meet us at Zvezda One. We’ll have a cargo of new tech we’re sending down to Marateen as a gesture of good faith from Hokozana to the Cythrans—hopefully to cement our alliance.”

  “And then you and I will overpower Qwadaleemia and Sarudeero and the Sissilbeni will just disappear somehow, right?” said Asher. “A space accident, maybe one caused by the Cythrans’ lack of familiarity with our technology. Is that the idea?”

  “Pretty much. See, I knew you were the man for the job.”

  Chapter Six

  Cormorant might be no more than a research vessel, but she was still a jump-capable inter-system ship. She was almost as large as Zvezda One. Jaydrupar and Asher went through a surprisingly fast quarantine in the main torus before they took an elevator to the crew torus. There, they were almost immediately greeted by Drienner Marcolis.

  “Glad you two are aboard,” said the old man. “Things are moving fast up here.”

  Asher laughed. “Things have been moving pretty fast down there too, Sir.”

  “So I gather. Anyway, we’ve got your downloads and Jaydrupar’s report. By the way, that plan to capture a couple of Cythrans? Pretty smart thinking. Sneaky, but smart.”

  “Thank you, Sir,” said Jaydrupar. He was obviously pleased with himself.

  “Doesn’t matter now, though, does it?” Marcolis snapped his fingers. “Everything’s going to have to be put on hold.”

  “What?” asked Jaydrupar, “Why?”

  “I’ll show you.” The old man led them around the crew torus to a command and control unit. It appeared to be a backup command center, manned mostly two- and three-bars. The woman in charge had only one star; she was not highly-ranked enough to be the Captain. Marcolis introduced her as Lieutenant Shareva. That would make her one of the junior bridge officers, Asher figured.

  The secondary command center was focused around a command and control unit, a large flat screen and associated holo displays capable of showing all kinds of tactical information. Right now, the main screen was filled by what Asher recognized as a model of the inner part of the Bright-Dim system. Various status bars and scrolling tickers clustered around the edges.

  Asher quickly oriented himself with the help of the Zvezda system-model download. He located Cierren Cythra, represented by a green dot, and Zvezda One, represented by a smaller yellow dot. A flashing Hokozana-blue dot in a much higher orbit of the planet must be Cormorant herself. The screen was centered on a large red dot, which appeared to be located near a gas giant that marked the boundary between the inner and outer parts of the system. The jumpgate orbited this gas giant, which was called Bernabeu. In fact, Asher saw that the jumpgate’s location was shown by a second yellow dot. “Is that a hostile?” he asked, pointing at the flashing red dot.

  “More than just a hostile, Donnie,” said Marcolis. “That’s a DiJeRiCo carrier group. They came through the jumpgate about twenty minutes ago. You’re looking at our best estimate of their current position.”

  “What are they doing here?” asked Asher.

  “We think they’re here to take Cierren Cythra.”

  “Let them have it,” said Jaydrupar.

  Marcolis shrugged resignedly. “I wish we could, but it’s too late. We signed a ninety-nine year lease deal for the entire system with Zvezda about two hours ago. We also contracted an alliance with them, making them pretty much a subsidiary of Hokozana. All the contracts were approved by the intercorp courts and DiJeRiCo was officially kicked out of the system forty-five minutes ago.”

  That meant that the work Ravkar and Lori had put in on Cierren Cythra over the past few days was now moot. Perhaps the mission to the Cythrans had never been anything more than a smokescreen to distract DiJeRiCo while Hokozana made a backroom deal with the Zvezda Company.

  “So this?” Jaydrupar indicated the display.

  “DiJeRiCo is going to war. We just received their notification of intent. They’re taking Bright-Dim by force.” Marcolis shook his head. “Looks like they want the Cythrans even more than we do.”

  “I’m pretty sure whoever ‘gets’ the Cythrans will be biting off more than they can chew,” said Jaydrupar. “Why don’t we bug out and leave them to it?”

  Marcolis sighed. “When I said it was too late, that’s exactly what I meant. The war is on. Three DiJeRiCo orbitals have been destroyed in the Killaunas system. They are bombarding one of our planets in the Grisen system. Contracts have to be honored. Half the corps in Ordered Space are going to be dragged into this thing before it’s over.”

  “So what do we do, Sir?”

  “First, we get our people off that planet. Second, we get control of the jumpgate, if we can.”

  “But DiJeRiCo will have left a force there, surely?” said Asher.

  “Indeed. We’re pretty sure they contracted a small fleet of non-corp pirates to watch it for them. But they’ll soon see that old Cormorant is a bit more than she seems.”

  “Shuttle Slipstream docked, Sir,” said Lieutenant Shareva. Asher wasn’t sure whether she was talking to Marcolis or was uplinked to her captain.

  “That will be the others from Cierren Cythra,” said Marcolis. “We pulled them out right on your heels.”

  Asher felt the familiar sick sensation in the pit of his stomach as the huge ship started to accelerate and change direction. He knew that Cormorant’s rotation would rapidly adjust to compensate for the effect. There was always a slight, discomfiting lag during the changes, though. It was one reason why many operatives, despite working for an enormous interstellar corp, preferred to find themselves a planetside or orbital niche and just stay put as long as possible. With subnet links essentially nullifying time lag for data, many could achieve just that. Still, cargo and personnel had to move in realtime, and for the most part in realspace. There was a reason why Fleet was one of the largest divisions of Hokozana.

  “How long to the jumpgate?” asked Marcolis.

  The command center officer glanced at the readouts on the main screen. She then made a mental calculation, or possibly consulted a download or ran a program on her neural net. “If all goes to plan, we’ll be there in six hours,” she said.

  “And the carrier group?”

  “We’re way out of active sensor range. They have probably been tracking us by passive methods, but there’s no way they’ll be able to keep up once we’re moving. The Captain has logged an erratic route, just in case.”

  That made sense, thought Asher. At this kind of distance in a vacuum, passive sensing was pretty much limited to visual ID. That meant whatever data the DiJeRiCo fleet had on them was a good thirty minutes old or more, the time it would take light reflected from Cormorant’s hull to reach the battle group. Evading them would be relatively easy. Of course, that was the nature of space warfare. No one could ever predictably locate and intercept an enemy ship in empty space. That made fixed points like planets, orbitals, and especially jumpgates crucial.

  The next hour or two were spent in a sort of tense inactivity. No one seemed willing to leave the command center, even though there really was nothing to do. As they waited in relative silence, Ravkar and Lori came in. The two women gave Jaydrupar a hard glance. Asher surmised that they had been brought up to speed on the Intel man’s assessment of the Cythrans. Aside from polite but strained greetings, the reunion didn’t do much to relieve the tense silence in the room.

  Toward the end of the second hour, the command center suddenly burst into activity. A tech at a console said, “Ma’am, we’ve got passive visuals on the battle group.”


  “Let’s see them, then,” said the Lieutenant.

  All eyes turned to the main screen, where the model of the system blinked out and was replaced by a view of what looked like stars or faceted jewels moving through space.

  “Compensate for that glare. Give me a false color image. Whatever’s best for making out the individual ships,” said the officer.

  “Yes Ma’am,” said the tech. “I think I’ve found a filter that will work.” He worked intently at his console, running some kind of program.

  The image on the screen resolved into a view of several large, cylindrical ships. They were spread out across many cubic kilometers of space, making each shape just a small tube on the display. As Asher watched, a set of inset screens opened around the edges of the main display, each showing a closer view of an individual ship.

  “There’s the carrier,” said Marcolis, indicating a huge, gray cylinder. “Much bigger than anything we’ve got outside the core systems at the moment.”

  “What’s the composition of the fleet?” asked the Lieutenant.

  A second tech answered. “The carrier is a DevCo BG-1 model, about thirty years old. There are three main bombardment ships—all GaE Marauders that were built on contract for DiJeRiCo last year. Five destroyers on picket. Those vary a lot. Stats on each are on screen now. There are also two ships that look like a new DiJeRiCo proprietary design that just rolled out of their main dock in the Anubis system within the past few months. Intel Mil desk is provisionally classing them as light cruisers.”

  Someone whistled. Another crewmember laughed nervously. “That’s a lot of firepower,” said Ravkar.

  “It is indeed,” said Marcolis. “With that, they can easily force Zvezda One to surrender. The bombardment ships must be to compel the allegiance of the Cythrans. The carrier can probably deploy a few squadrons of atmo-able ships as well.”

  “I have another concern,” said Jaydrupar. “If they brought that big a fleet, surely they left more than just a ragtag bunch of non-corps to defend the jumpgate. After all, if we took out the gate, all that firepower would be stranded here.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they brought everything they need to build their own gate,” said Marcolis. “The Zvezda gate leads to Iribarren, which is a multi-contract system. From there, almost every gate goes to a Hokozana system or ally. Establishing a direct jump to a DiJeRiCo-controlled system will be a top priority. I imagine they’ve already got a gate waiting in Kozar, which is the nearest system that they own.”

  “So if we can somehow get control of the gate, Hokozana will be right there waiting on the other side,” said Asher.

  “Oh, yes,” said Marcolis. “Believe me, we haven’t lost the fight for Cierren Cythra yet.”

  “Right, Sir,” said the Lieutenant. “Cormorant’s got a lot more to her than meets the eye.”

  The remainder of the trip to the jumpgate was anticlimactic after the clamor that had arisen on the sighting of the enemy fleet. They were able to maintain a pretty good visual on the DiJeRiCo ships all the way, despite the time lag, which had to be approaching thirty minutes. That suggested that the enemy were either not aware of the Cormorant or didn’t care that they were being watched. It was just too easy for a ship to hide in space if its captain wanted to, even a huge ship like many of those in the DiJeRiCo fleet.

  As they approached the jumpgate, the Lieutenant had the techs switch the display to the passive visuals they were getting of the neighborhood of the gate itself. At first, Asher could only see the massive hoop of the gate, and that only because it had been colorized blue on the screen to set off the gate’s narrow rim from the blackness around it. As he watched, colored dots were added to the display, flashing on like city lights in the night. For some reason, the techs were showing the contacts as orange. Perhaps because they weren’t a hundred percent sure that everyone waiting at the gate was a hostile. Asher thought that it was a pretty good bet that they were, though.

  Light after light blinked on on the big screen. Small stat readout panels would appear next to a light when the techs got enough information to start to classify it. These panels weren’t readable to the naked eye, but they could be uplinked directly to a Hokozana neural net. Asher linked into Battle Net and let the information wash through his neural net. Thirty-two ships had been detected already and more were coming up all the time. So far, all they could see were various converted civilian ships, mostly cargo movers and scouts. These would be the non-corp pirate fleet. Non-corps rarely had access to large or advanced ships, and therefore relied more on numbers than tech. If DiJeRiCo had left any ships in wait for Cormorant, they weren’t immediately apparent.

  As Asher watched, the orange lights on the display all flashed together, twice, and then blinked to red. Behind him, the Lieutenant said, “All contacts reclassed as hostile. I guess the Captain’s not taking any chances.”

  “But what if there are civilians in there, just trying to get out of the way?” asked Ravkar.

  Unexpectedly, it was Lori who answered, “Then they’re in trouble, I guess.”

  “I’m confused,” said Asher. “I thought this was a research vessel. I understand that there’s more to it than I think, but what exactly is our play here?”

  “Just wait,” said the Lieutenant. “You’ll see soon enough.”

  Just then, three new contacts appeared just in front of the Cormorant. “We’re firing Ma’am,” said one of the techs. Almost immediately, three more contacts appeared, and then three more. Each contact sped away from the ship in the general direction of the jumpgate.

  “Go to tactical,” said the Lieutenant. The Battle Net display switched to a model of the engagement space. Cormorant was a pulsing blue oval. All the other ships were red dots. The distant gate was a yellow halo. In the space between the Hokozana ship and the hostile contacts, little green pinpricks flared into life.

  “Missiles?” asked Asher under his breath. “I hope there’s more to it than that.”

  Marcolis apparently overheard him. The old man smiled. “Oh, don’t worry, Donnie. There’s a lot more to it.”

  Several of the red hostile contacts broke away from their orbits of the gate and headed toward the missiles fired by the Cormorant. There were twelve missiles in the void between the Hokozana vessel and the non-corp fleet, arranged in four flights of three. Cormorant had ceased firing. On the tactical display, the blue oval began to change direction. Sure enough, Asher felt the move in the pit of his stomach.

  As he watched, the first red dot converged with the lead flight of missiles. Nothing happened. The missiles continued on toward the heart of the cluster of hostile ships. The non-corps, meanwhile, were forming up in front of the gate and beginning to move slowly forward.

  Suddenly, the display lit up with a white flash that obscured all the combatants. “Full detonation, Ma’am,” said a tech.

  When the white light faded, Asher saw that the green dots that represented the missiles were all gone. So, too, were about three-quarters of the red dots of the hostile ships. “What happened?” he asked. “What was that?”

  Marcolis laughed. “The newest thing from Research Miltech. They call it a supernova bomb. Twelve absolutely simultaneous fusion explosions focused in a very small area. Supposedly, for those hostiles, it was like being in the corona of an exploding star.”

  Ravkar drew in a sharp breath. “But it was so close. It could have hit us, or the gate.”

  “But it didn’t,” said Jaydrupar. “Give the folks in Fleet Ops some credit. They know what they’re doing.”

  Lori cleared her throat. “I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but there’s still about eight or nine hostiles out there. And it looks like DiJeRiCo did leave us a welcoming party.” She indicated the stat panels for two of the dots. “Those two are destroyers. Do we have any more little surprises for them?”

  As if on cue, the jumpgate blazed to life behind the incoming hostile ships. Several new ships appeared through the aperture. All of these
contacts were coded Hokozana blue.

  “We did all we needed to do.” Marcolis looked very satisfied. “We drew them away from the gate for a moment. Now, we have the advantage.”

  More and more Hokozana ships poured through the gate. The lead vessels of the new fleet quickly let loose a storm of missiles and EMag-driven projectiles against the cluster of hostile ships. One after another, the red lights winked out as the ships were neutralized. In short order, a Hokozana battlefleet controlled the Bright-Dim jumpgate.

  Asher’s neural net alerted him to an incoming link. It was on the Hokozana encrypted channel. He accepted the link.

  “All operatives aboard the Cormorant,” said a loud voice in Asher’s mind. “This is Captain Echo Hawk. As you may have been able to see, we have engaged a hostile force and emerged victorious. We are now about to rendezvous with a Hokozana battlefleet. This marks our first engagement as a ship, and I wish to thank and commend all of you for excellent work. Of course, this battle also marks the beginning of a new corp war, something we haven’t experienced in generations. In the coming days and weeks, we will surely be called on again to back up our Loyalty Oaths with action. Good luck to you all. Command staff to Conference Room A. Echo Hawk out.”

  “Well,” said Marcolis, “a stirring speech. Shall we head for the conference room?” He turned to look for the way out of the command center, and seemed to decide to head spinward around the torus. The others hesitated.

  Asher said, “You may not have noticed, Sir, but most of us aren’t command staff.”

  “I know, Donnie,” said Marcolis. “But you all are our resident experts on Cierren Cythra. We’ll need you in this coming debate. Also, where is Kazmalewski?”

  “He’s in a crew bunk, Sir,” said Ravkar, “getting some rest. Apparently the idea of a ship-to-ship battle didn’t really faze him.”