Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five) Read online

  Croma Venture

  Spiral Wars; Book Five

  Joel Shepherd

  Copyright © 2018 by Joel Shepherd

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and is not intended by the author.

  Cover Illustration by Stephan Martiniere. http://www.martiniere.com/

  Titles by Kendall Roderick. http://rmind-design.com

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  About the Author

  1

  Erik awoke. The wall display by his bedside said the time was 06:15. He’d gone to sleep at ten, and it just felt like eight hours. One thing to be said for four months of relative safety in one spot, without people chasing them and trying to shoot their collective asses off, was that Phoenix’s overworked, overstressed crew were finally getting some decent sleep.

  He reached for his AR glasses, the first thing every Fleet captain did upon waking, and put them on. Lien Wang was still there, close now out of jump. ETA until lunar orbit was barely three hours, with a shuttle arriving at Defiance close after that. He lay on his back, blinked on the ID icons and read the details for the tenth time.

  Lien Wang was a radium-class scout, made for long-range reconnaissance. Civvies often thought that would make for a small ship, but Lien Wang was nearly half the size of Phoenix — the bulk of it engines, powered by similar technology. It was slim and low-mass for its size, and could power in and out of star systems a long way from their gravitational center, sometimes undetected. In the war such ships had been invaluable, gathering intelligence on tavalai movements.

  The scout’s Captain was Angelo Sampey, a hundred and twenty year old veteran known to anyone who was anyone in Fleet. And he’d come, yesterday’s encrypted message had said, through tavalai space bearing the IDs of the Inspection Force, to talk directly to Phoenix. Beyond that, there had been no further information.

  Erik could guess. Humans had won the war, but not just any human ship was allowed through tavalai space. Inspection Force were empowered by the peace treaty to travel through tavalai space and see that the disarmament provisions were being observed. With any other race than the tavalai it would have been inadequate, but the officious, law-abiding tavalai had thus far observed all provisions, and treated all Inspection Force vessels with polite formality.

  Recon vessels like Lien Wang were rarely used for Inspection Force duties. Inspection Force ships tended to be larger with a significant shuttle component to allow for large bureaucratic visitations to the surface of various planets. They also needed berthing for all the inspectors and accountants who would check tavalai records, and the ambassadors who would attend to the various documents of treaty upkeep and reaffirmation. Tavalai didn’t take inspection vessels seriously unless they came loaded with bureaucrats, and Fleet was of the opinion that if tavalai equated such things with agreeable civilisation then it was a small price to pay for strengthening their cooperation.

  But Lien Wang was stripped of all excess weight, and carried just one shuttle. Which meant that whatever temporary ID she carried for safe transit through tavalai space, she was no part of the regular Inspection Force. She’d come directly from human space. And as much as Fleet HQ would have great interest in seeing Defiance for themselves, no tavalai authority would have granted the IF identification for that purpose alone. Lien Wang was here to see Phoenix, sent direct from whoever was now in charge of human affairs back home. Erik was certain of it.

  So, then. He climbed from bed and sat on the edge of the mattress, trying to muster the purpose to begin his morning exercises while putting the glasses on review, to catch up with the night-shift’s reports. Lieutenant Rooke’s second-shift were keeping the Phoenix refit going non-stop, and progress was spectacular. Then there were preparations for great meetings, as the high denominations of the parren House Harmony always did everything grandly, this time to discuss the vexing issues of the drysine data-core that Phoenix had unleashed upon the Spiral. But today Erik could muster no enthusiasm for any of these things.

  He took his slate off the bedside table and removed his glasses to look at it properly. Words unadorned, descriptions, thoughts. All utterly inadequate. He wanted to delete the lot and start again, but he knew from experience that a new version would be no better. He stared at the dry, stale words, and was disgusted with his own inadequacy.

  The adjoining door to Trace’s quarters opened and she entered, in sweat shirt and stretch pants, her brown skin bright with the sheen of exercise, sipping a dark green smoothie. “Morning,” she said. “Do you have those tennis balls in storage?”

  “Bottom shelf,” said Erik, pointing. Trace went and crouched by the little kitchenette, retrieving the items.

  “I need them for the kids to practice with,” she explained. Erik nodded. Trace glanced, and guessed what he was looking at. “Hey,” she said gently. “I’ve read them all. They’re fine.”

  “They’re not. I could give them to Lisbeth and she’d do far better, even if she didn’t know them as well.”

  Trace went across and sat on the bed beside him. “Erik, it’s not your job to summarise a life, or to give meaning to everything we lost. The families will do that for themselves, in time. No one’s looking at you to tell them all what it’s for.”

  “Yours are better than mine too,” Erik said bleakly. “I’m not good at this, Trace.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Trace said calmly. “But even if it were true, so what? You’d be a carrier captain, not a poet.”

  Erik stared at the slate. Sixty spacer lives. Fifty-two marines. Trace wrote the condolence letters to the marines’ families, Erik to the spacers’. They’d done it four months ago, directly after the Battle of Defiance, but in all those months they’d not yet found a courier they trusted to take it all the way back to human space unmolested. Only now, with Lien Wang’s arrival, did he have to finally send the things. And only now, at the prospect of all those families receiving these letters in person, did the feeling truly hit him — that he’d let every one of these men and women down.

  Erik took a deep breath. “Captain Sampey’s down at 09:40 at the tower. I want you there.”

  “I’ll be there,” Trace confirmed. “Just us?”

  “Just us.”

  “Shouldn’t Lisbeth be there too? Fleet need a briefing on parren affairs, Lisbeth’s the best placed to give them one.”

  “Lisbeth’s got her own appointment right after us,” Erik explained, climbing off the bed and heading to the kitchen for some coffee. “Gesul insisted. He’ll get his own as well, condition of Lien Wang’s entry.”

  “That’s fair,” said Trace, also getting up. “It’s their city. With any luck, Rehnar won’t try to kill us all
while Sampey’s here.”

  “Or even after Sampey leaves,” said Erik, without optimism.

  The pressurised habitat was called Aronach Dar, which sounded fancy but was actually just a parren numerical grid reference to describe its location on the city surface. Aronach Dar was a great dome, a kilometre across and containing a giant spinning wheel like any orbital space station. That wheel spun to create one full human gravity for all occupants… but the rim was angled at fifteen degrees to account for the Defiance moon’s gravity as well. The dome enclosed the entire wheel for protection, and there were thankfully no windows anywhere, or the blur of this giant merry-go-round would make motion sickness in even the most hardy spacer.

  Erik walked to the cafeteria, still something of a novel experience for a spacer, as no Fleet warships had the room for one. Crew leapt to their feet to the cry of ‘Captain on deck!’, then sat once more at Erik’s ‘at ease’. He sat with Lieutenant Commander Justine ‘Giggles’ Dufresne and Commander Dylan ‘Bucky’ Draper, a pair of youngsters who’d been no more than lieutenant reserve pilots before their lives had been turned upside down, and now found themselves second and third-in-command on one of humanity’s most powerful warships.

  Draper was thirty-three, Trace’s age, and had a round, freckled face, sandy-brown hair and prominent front teeth — thus ‘Bucky’. His background was middle-class suburban, from Columbia on the world of Esparza. One parent was a teacher, the other ran a small business, and he’d grown up so utterly unremarkable, in his own words, that he was completely astonished to look around and see how far he’d come. But he’d excelled at sports and academics, and several good teachers had encouraged him to follow his fanciful dream of Fleet Academy, where he’d risen even further. He was really far too young for his current position, but then again, the higher he’d risen so far, and the larger the challenges thrown his way, the better he’d done. Erik just hoped that the trend continued, now that the suburban boy from nowhere-in-particular found himself second-in-command of the UFS Phoenix at an age where most of his school friends’ lives revolved around party weekends to break the monotony of middle-class jobs.

  Justine Dufresne was more typical of a senior Fleet officer — the daughter of a wealthy spacer family, she’d grown up on a station and counted many proud Fleet veterans and martyrs in her close family. Like many from that background she had a bad case of ‘spacer humour’, which was to say that she had none, or little enough that it was rarely observed. Naturally the crew called her ‘Giggles’. The sims showed that she was if anything a slightly superior natural pilot to Draper… but Erik had distrusted the sim’s high weighting to what he called ‘obstacle courses’. When he threw more complex situations at them, requiring judgement calls on unknowable factors like politics and alien psychology, Draper always did better. Given what Phoenix had been through lately, Erik was certain that Draper’s total skillset better qualified him for the rank of commander than Dufresne’s. Dufresne, it was widely suspected, was displeased with that assessment, but had thus far been civil about it. She was also an old guard Fleet loyalist, and was only on Phoenix because she’d been stuck aboard when the shit had hit the fan at Homeworld. If she’d been planetside at the time, Erik knew there was no chance she’d have joined Phoenix in going renegade against the rightful authority of Fleet, no matter what the crimes Fleet HQ committed against her. In the intervening months her attitude had softened considerably, having seen firsthand what they were up against and exactly how crooked her beloved Fleet leadership had become. But still Erik sometimes wondered, if and when they came face-to-face with Fleet authority once more, just which way she’d go.

  Lieutenant Wei Shilu joined them at the table, and there was no standing attention for him as the only three spacers requiring it were already here, and Major Thakur was elsewhere. “Wei, how’s the arm?” Erik asked him.

  “It’s getting there,” said Shilu, flexing his left. He wore a glove on the synthetic hand, pressure to help get sensation into reluctant fingertips. To Erik the arm looked as mobile and natural as any regular arm… though apparently it did not yet feel that way to Phoenix’s first-shift Coms Officer. “It’s been waking me up at nights, though. That’s its latest trick, after the pins-and-needles.”

  “Waking you up how?” asked Draper past a mouthful of light soup.

  “Well it’s odd. You know how when you’re trying to get to sleep, and you keep getting little itches? And you scratch them, and they go away… and I never thought about it before, but why don’t you get those itches while you’re sleeping? And the answer is obviously because they’d wake you up. So it’s not that you don’t get the itches, it’s that your brain decides not to notice them… or that’s what the Doc says, anyhow. But I’m getting itches on the arm now, and they do wake me up. The brain’s supposed to numb them while I’m asleep, but for some reason it’s not happening with the arm.”

  “I’d have thought,” said Erik, “that the only thing worse than an itchy synthetic arm would be a synthetic arm that wasn’t able to get itchy.”

  “I guess,” said Shilu, looking unconvinced. “My balance isn’t the same, either.”

  “Oh go on, you’ll be dancing Swan Lake again in no time,” Draper insisted. “It’s your arm, not your leg.”

  “Shows what you know about dancing,” Shilu sniffed. Wei Shilu had been a professional ballet dancer for a while, putting all academic pursuits on hold to follow his passion. That had lasted until a sard attack on New Congo, killing thousands, whereupon he’d been no longer able to enjoy his dancing, he said, for the feeling that it was all so frivolous when all these other men and women were out in space giving their lives to keep him safe. “Proper balance is an all-body thing, it takes arms and legs.”

  Lieutenant Hausler joined them in the growing chatter of new arrivals, the squeal of chair legs, the clatter of utensils. Happy sounds, Erik thought, remembering family breakfasts, his parents, sisters and household staff talking over food, coffee and emerging schedules. “Groundcrew says PH-1 is prepped for departure anytime, Captain,” said Hausler, sitting his lanky frame on Erik’s left with a tray. “Now if my damn co-pilot can just drag her ass out of Medbay, we’ll be good to go.”

  “What’s wrong with Cory?” asked Erik.

  “Dunno,” said Hausler, eating without concern. “Lady issues, I think.”

  “Well I’m sure she appreciates you sharing that with everyone,” Dufresne said primly.

  Hausler shrugged. “You bet. We’ll have a full load, Charlie Platoon’s coming too. Manifest says the Major’s not coming?”

  “She’s already gone with Jersey, playing with her babies,” Erik explained. “Borrowed my tennis balls this morning.”

  “Well there go your tennis balls,” said Draper. “Someone had those in personal storage? Who?”

  “Yep,” said Erik, still eating. They’d belonged to Ensign Remy Hale, Engineering’s XO, who’d died with all the others in the defence of Defiance. Officers at the table saw Erik not elaborating, and a brief silence followed, filled only with eating. If there were spare personal items lying unclaimed of late, there was usually just one reason why. Draper looked faintly mortified, realising his mistake. He did that kind of thing more than he should. The Commander of Phoenix, and still just a naive kid in some things.

  Tif arrived at the table with Skah, to everyone’s relief. “Hello Skah!” said the table in rough unison, and the little kuhsi boy looked delighted despite them saying it to him nearly every morning. He scrambled on his bench at Hausler’s side opposite his Mummy, and Hausler ruffled the boy’s wide, floppy ears.

  “Herro!” he told them. “Hausrer, you want sone of ny breakfast?” Skah’s tray was mostly meat, sliced and cooked in several different styles. Kuhsi digestion handled little else.

  “I think we’d better save your breakfast for you, kid,” Hausler told him. “We don’t want to run out of meat or you’ll have nothing to eat.”

  “If rittuw boy keep eating s
o nuch,” his mother observed, “we run out of neat anyway.” Skah scowled at her, and chomped on a slice with sharp teeth. Those teeth weren’t so little any longer, and the big incisors looked as though they could put a hole in someone. Or two holes. Luckily for the crew, Skah’s temper was never more than boisterous. “He cun frying with ne this norning. Rewtenant Crozier say it’s okay. You renenber to say thank you to Rewtenant Crozier, Skah.”

  “I wiw!” Skah said indignantly. “But Rewtenant Crozier nad at ne.”

  Shilu frowned at Hausler. “Mad,” Hausler translated. “Why is JC mad at you, Skah?”

  “Because I run into her, nake her spiw her drink.” Skah’s smile was embarrassed — not easy to see with a kuhsi’s naturally pursed lips, but obvious to anyone friendly with Skah. “And other narines aw raugh.” About the table, officers repressed grins.

  “Skah!” Tif said crossly, evidently hearing this for the first time. And followed it with a rebuke in Gharkhan — likely that she'd told him a thousand times not to run in the hallways, Erik thought.

  “Yeah,” said Hausler around a mouthful, “I think if Lieutenant Crozier was angry at you, Skah, she wouldn’t have let you come flying with her and your mother this morning. It takes a lot more than a spilled drink to upset JC.”

  “Don’t encourage hin,” his mother objected. Always unflappable, Hausler just smiled.

  “Which sector this morning, Tif?” Draper asked her.

  “KT-486,” said Tif. “Stiw no one there, even now. Rooks rike factories, naybe. We rook for technowogy before parren get everything, so naybe good prace to rook.”