Defiance: (The Spiral Wars Book 4) Page 5

  “I’ll take your word for it, all of you,” Erik assured them. It was incredibly interesting, and in other circumstances he’d have loved to stay and discuss it further with them. But the curse of being Captain was that his interests were general, not specific, and he simply did not have the time. “Stan, it sounds like you’ve got nearly enough for a presentation now. All the Major will need is ground coordinates, we can figure out the rest on the fly.”

  “Ah yes,” Romki drawled, refocusing on his screens. “The famous Phoenix seat-of-the-pants. I’m sure we can do better than that Captain, give us another four hours at least.”

  “Four,” Erik agreed, turning to leave. “And Hiro, if the Doc asks me where you are, I’m not going to cover for you.”

  “Never asked you to,” said Hiro as he left.

  Erik’s next stop was one level up and a quarter-rotation around the cylinder. In the steel-grey storage bay he found Tif, eating what looked like chicken from her own breakfast box, and circling the contraption rigged amongst the vertical stacks of big shelves in the surrounding walls, each large enough to store a body. The contraption was a spare bridge seat, complete with interface insets, seven-point restraints, and a full spread of surrounding displays. On the armrests were G-restraints for the arms, and twin joysticks within stylised handgrips with multiple buttons and triggers. A starship pilot’s post, in replica. Four large steel supports drove the corners through floor and ceiling, to hold it secure in manoeuvres.

  Tif walked around it, like a hunter who’d just found a large, dead animal, and wondered if it was safe to eat. “Don’t know word,” she admitted, past her sharp-toothed mouthful of chicken. Past accent, sharp teeth and food, it was barely intelligible. “Copy? Copy pirot seat?”

  “Pilot seat, yes,” Erik agreed, sitting at the observer chair before a display. “Simulator. You know the word?”

  Tif made a face, tearing off another mouthful of chicken. Doing that, she looked even less sentient-biped than usual. More like a carnivorous hunter, lips pulled back from the short muzzle to expose alarming teeth. Erik marvelled at how the long ears flattened with each bite, the muscles of her face conditioned by millions of years of evolution to keep them away from her mouth when feeding.

  “Don’t have transrator on,” she admitted. “Sim… simurator?”

  “Yes, simulator.”

  “Rrrr,” Tif complained, trying to pronounce the L, and failing. “Stupid sound. Goknaroch.”

  “Bless you,” said Erik, eating fruit pieces from his own breakfast box. They’d been thawed from a snap-freeze, and tasted decidedly mediocre. Like the coffee. “Simulator for Phoenix. Pilot’s seat. All the Phoenix pilots come down here to run combat sims when we have time, then we critique each other’s moves. It keeps us sharp.”

  “Yes.” Tif nodded, a gesture she’d been using more and more. “For shuttuw, we sit shuttuw cockpit, run sim in cockpit.”

  “Yes, well you can’t do that in Phoenix. We need that cockpit operational at all times.” Tif crouched to peer curiously at the setup, then examined the armrests and joysticks. She hadn’t understood yet why she was here, Erik saw. That was to be expected. There was no rush — he had to take time to eat anyway, and he’d only seen Tif once, briefly, after events on Kantovan. “I saw Skah down in Medbay. Private Rolonde was helping him to read a story. Corporal Rael was enjoying the company.”

  “Good,” said Tif, now tearing into some flatbread. Kuhsi did mostly meat, but also some vegetables, well cooked. Absolutely no fruit, as their digestion welcomed protein and some carbs, but regular sugar in even small quantities could make them ill. “Surprise he awake. Funny… rittuw boy, back hone, back Choghoth? Rise eary, rise norning. But now, on Phoenix, Phoenix too eary for Skah. Skah want go back to bed. I say no, I say Jess teach Engrish, you no nake Jess angry.”

  Erik didn’t think there was much chance of anyone getting angry at Skah. With all else that went on, even a little boy’s bad behaviour was a ray of sunshine for most. He smiled. “Lisbeth never liked early mornings either. They have that in common.”

  Tif looked at him, her big golden eyes sombre. One ear drooped, sympathetically. “Skah miss Risbeth. Aw miss Risbeth. Aw pirots.”

  Erik nodded. On Phoenix, Lisbeth had divided her time between the techs in Engineering, and the shuttle pilots in Operations. Phoenix had been short of shuttle crew, and was now one short again. With so much to learn in both fields, she’d studied and practised hard. She was still far from a Fleet-standard front-seater, but the pilots had respected her dedication, and even opined without too much patronising that she could make Fleet-standard one day, if she stuck at it. Erik had sincerely hoped her voyage wouldn’t last that long. He still did.

  He took a mouthful of his sandwich, and indicated to the simulator. “You like it?”

  Tif blinked, looking a little puzzled. “Yes. Why?”

  “Would you like to try it?”

  Tif blinked again. Then stared, ears dropping, mouth open. “Fry Phoenix?” She pointed to herself, incredulous.

  “Fly the Phoenix simulator, Tif. It’s just a sim. But your reflexes are top notch, the other shuttle pilots say you’ve got great hands and some of the best feel for the ship they’ve ever seen. All Fleet pilots get tested for aptitude, then sorted into starships, shuttles, haulers, atmospherics, etc. Hausler and Jersey have both been tested for aptitude, and found best suited for shuttles. But we’ve never tested you.”

  Tif’s big eyes glistened. Looking at her, Erik almost felt a lump in his own throat. To have been accepted on Phoenix meant the world to her. She’d come from nothing, from a culture where women were less than nothing, and here amongst the aliens she’d found all the things that kuhsi valued — pride, honour, and status with a big, powerful clan. It meant a future for her boy, and glory for her blood family, however little they’d appreciate it. And though new to Phoenix, she knew enough to know that no one was ever tested on the command simulator who was not in some kind of consideration for the role.

  “You think…” Her voice caught, and she tried again. “You think I could…?”

  “I don’t know Tif,” said Erik, trying to contain both pleasure and amusement. This wasn’t fun and games he was proposing. He knew as well as anyone the toll that this particular chair could take on a person. “But we’re short of pilots, and the people who can do it well enough, for a ship like this one, are very rare. I’ll be honest — you’re probably not suitable. Even Hausler isn’t quite there, and you know he’s as good a raw pilot as you’ll ever see. But having fast hands isn’t quite enough for a starship, you have to be able to visualise beyond the light horizon, you have to be able to see big spaces, all moving at high speed, and coordinate a hundred different things at once.”

  “I try!” Tif said fiercely, with great emotion. “Naybe I not good, but I try!”

  He made it through the ship’s core to Midships just as the shuttle from Kanamandali began its final docking manoeuvre, passing spacers coming the other way as the pulley strap dragged him zero-G through the rotating tube.

  “That’s a nice offer,” Trace said in his ear. “But I’m not actually second-in-command of this ship any longer, and I think he’ll probably respect you more one-on-one.”

  Curious, Erik thought as he eyed the approaching Midships bulkhead, where the great cylinder socket-joint made a gap, and the tube no longer spun as he left the crew cylinder behind. When they’d started this journey, Trace had been the equal-highest ranked officer on the ship. She’d also been the guiding steel behind their initial actions, and in the early days, when they’d still had crew onboard who couldn’t be trusted, she was the guarantor of crew discipline as well. But now, with him a full-ranked Captain, and Suli Shahaim Commander, Trace was equal-third ranked with Lieutenant Commander Draper.

  It took an effort to recall that, sometimes, because in Erik’s mind at least (and he suspected many of the crew’s) she was far more than that. As always on carriers, in relations between
marines and spacers, it depended on circumstance. On board Phoenix she was ranked no higher than she needed to be. When off-ship objectives came into play, she became nearly as important as the Captain, and sometimes moreso. It was still his reflex to invite her along when some bigshot alien importance visited their deck, if only because on the current two-shift arrangement, all of the other senior bridge crew would be occupied, while Trace alone could make some time.

  “What’s the problem?” Erik asked her.

  “Well I trashed two suits just recently,” Trace replied, and Erik could hear the whine of powertools somewhere near. Then the crash of heavy equipment being moved, and yelling conversation — she was in Assembly, fixing her armour by hand, as all marines were trained to do. “And Command Squad’s not much better. So if we don’t get this lot up and running, I’m going to have to put some other squad out of action to borrow their suits for Command Squad, which will not make them happy.”

  Erik knew better than to hope that this setback for Command Squad would keep her out of the next deployment. If her marines were deployed, particularly into something hazardous, she’d find a way to put herself squarely in the middle once more.

  Erik flew headfirst down the handlines and cargo nets of upper Berth Five, just as the tavalai shuttle crashed into the external grapples. The great mechanisms against the inner hull heaved as tension-loaded arms took the weight, and clung. Phoenix’s Operations crew had long since figured through the difficulties of docking tavalai shuttles, and got the access tube in place, and managed to not screw up communications with the tavalai crew. Soon there were tavalai floating up the access into the airlock, then a hiss of equalising air, and two unarmed karasai entered one at a time — big tavalai in jumpsuits, looking warily about with their big, flat heads and wide-set eyes.

  Security was Echo 2-3, four marines in light armour, floating with good vantage to see the Berth Five airlock, their posture unthreatening but with weapons to hand. Behind the first big tavalai came a reddy-brown tavalai who looked somewhat familiar in the way that some tavalai had come to look familiar in the past months. He wore a blue jumpsuit with few adornments, and grasped the guiding strap with the elegance of an old spacer. He looked ‘up’, to the degree that the Midships berth would naturally suggest that the berth airlock was the floor, and the high walls, rails and bulkheads, stacked with cargo shelves, personnel handles and securing nets, were the walls heading up to some non-existent ceiling.

  “Captain Debogande?” said the Admiral, as though uncertain.

  Erik smiled. “You speak English flawlessly, but you struggle to tell us apart?”

  “Learning English is a matter of books and practice,” said the Admiral, in that deep, guttural tavalai voice. “Many of those who learn would not know what to do if they met an actual human in person.” Erik pulled himself head-first down the wall strap, and the Admiral made his way to the base of that wall, between his two nervous karasai. Once there, they each grabbed a support, and grasped the other’s hand. “You did it, Captain. An astonishing feat. The Kantovan Vault itself.”

  Erik thought he must be coming to read tavalai faces much better, because he saw both genuine respect, and hard suspicion, mingling in the Admiral’s big, three-lidded eyes. “Thank you, Admiral. We recovered the artefact you requested, apparently right where you said it would be. Captain Delaganda has it now, on Podiga.”

  “Apparently decrypted,” Janik replied, with hard suspicion.

  “Yes,” Erik agreed.

  “How? That is among the most secure State Department secrets. We were wondering how we would decrypt it ourselves, should you be successful. We were preparing for a long and arduous effort from our best technicians. But you appear to have done it in hours.”

  “Admiral Janik,” Erik said coolly. “Tavalai have underestimated humans since first contact. Our capabilities are many.” Clearly Admiral Janik had a very strong suspicion of what passenger Phoenix carried aboard. He might not have known before he arrived in this system, but with the amount of chatter flying around now, all of it newly sourced from Kantovan System, he must have surely found out on approach. “What will you do with it?”

  “Firstly, I will read it. Then I will consider. I understand that you have read it? Against our understanding?”

  “We recovered two cylinders. We needed to read both to be sure we gave you the correct one, and kept the one we wanted for ourselves.”

  “And it gives you the information you were after?”

  “It appears to,” Erik said cautiously. Now that Phoenix was stuck in Cherichal System, surrounded by tavalai warships and civilian vessels, there was no guarantee they could actually go anywhere to utilise that information. What would happen next had always been very vague in their agreements. Now, that seemed a mistake. “The information we’ve given you is aimed at State Department. Does Tantotavarin do the State Department’s bidding?”

  “Tantotavarin is a tavalai Fleet loyalist. She is assessing the situation now. She will discover that I and my faction are certainly in serious breach of tavalai law. It will then be up to me, armed with your new data from the vault, to convince them that it was in a good cause. Tantotavarin being here is both a curse and a blessing — a curse in that she is incorruptible and formidable, and a blessing in that I am presented with the opportunity to win her over. Should I succeed, our cause will grow much stronger.”

  “Captain Kaledramani?”

  “Yes,” Janik agreed. “Captain Kaledramani. Even humans have heard of him.”

  “Oh yes,” said Erik. “We each kept track of the dangerous ones.”

  “Certainly. Captain Debogande, I have further news. I am breaking more rules in revealing it to you, but in the interests of tavalai security, I feel I must. Perhaps thirty days ago, a tavalai cruiser left Stoya System en-route to its home base. It never arrived. Two more civilian ships, at Corparalda and Vanadragali, have similarly vanished. Most concerningly of all, one of our better warships was intercepted by forces unknown not far from Cherichal, and has similarly vanished. We know that it was intercepted because we have found residual debris from a fight. From what the trajectory and detail of that debris indicates, the fight was against only a single opponent, and was violently short.”

  Erik frowned. “Someone’s picking off your ships? I’m very sorry for your losses Admiral, but how does that concern Phoenix?”

  “We have drawn a line of probability through these attacks, and they appear to be emanating from K9-XT, inside the territory of sard space. Many of our navigational buoys on the routes along that path have been interrogated by hostile communications systems, and information of their most recent contacts extracted.”

  Erik’s frown grew deeper. “Wait, that’s supposed to be nearly impossible. Those buoys are damn hard to crack, our Fleet’s been trying for decades.”

  “And they’re supposed to self-destruct rather than surrender that information,” Janik agreed. “But even so.” His hard, suspicious eyes swivelled inward to take in Erik’s expression. Inviting him to understand. And perhaps to admit guilt.

  “Sard space?” Erik wondered. And he pictured those systems that Janik had just mentioned, an arc of jump points leading back… along the way Phoenix had entered into tavalai space. From sard space. From the system known to humans as Gsi-81T, its sard name being unknown and probably unpronounceable, where an enormous drysine ship building facility had been commandeered by a deepynine queen, supported by alo and sard allies. Destroyed, by Phoenix, with help from the Dobruta’s Makimakala.

  And Erik’s eyes widened. “They’re following us!”

  “They’re hunting you,” Janik corrected. “We do not know how many, and how powerful, but something is coming for Phoenix, Captain Debogande. Something powerful enough to destroy our better ships without effort. Perhaps they want revenge, for the facility that you destroyed. But I think it more likely that they are not after you at all. Rather, I think they are after that abomination you carry in your carg
o holds.”

  4

  Trace was last aboard PH-1 before departure, with two marines in tow. She pulled herself on seat restraints to her customary command post near the cockpit hatch, her two marines taking places behind her, before the row holding Erik and Suli Shahaim. Erik saw in surprise that one was Private Kelvin Krishnan, from Echo Platoon, Second Squad.

  “Captain,” said Krishnan with pleasure. “Commander.”

  “Hi Kel,” said Erik. “And that’s Lance Corporal Haynes, is it?” Haynes led Third Section, but it was Krishnan who’d been stuck with Erik and Trace on Stoya III, and had been there to discover the minor Domesh Temple at the base of Mount Kosik.

  “Yessir,” said Haynes, busy doing his buckles in the certain knowledge that the Major would tear a strip off if he wasted time brown nosing with the ship’s commanders.

  “Lieutenant Hausler, we are secure in the hold,” came Trace’s voice from up front. “You are green for departure.”

  “Hausler copies Major, PH-1 is green for departure.” There followed a clang and thump as the grapples disengaged, then a short burst of downward thrust from the directionals. Main thrust followed, building intensely to bring them clear of Phoenix’s shadow, then easing as PH-1 acquired her course — straight for Tantotavarin, three hundred kilometres away.

  “Commander, I’d like some more details on Tantotavarin’s Captain,” said Trace above the dull roar of engines at low thrust. “I’ve read the briefing, it’s a bit thin.”

  Tantotavarin’s Captain was named Kaledramani. Human Fleet knew him as ‘Killer Kaled’, and he was nearly as infamous among humans as Captain Pantillo had been among tavalai. As a marine, Trace paid less attention to the tales of tavalai spacers than she did to those of tavalai marines.

  “Kaledramani is known as a tavalai nationalist,” said Suli, with her usual encyclopaedic knowledge of such things. “He’s a hardass, very aggressive by tavalai standards, and quite unorthodox. He’s not especially popular with tavalai Fleet HQ, mostly for being an opinionated pain-in-the-neck, and berating them for their conservatism. His education is Gamalan Institution, and he retains their strong backing, whatever his unpopularity elsewhere.”