Battlespace (The Stars Aflame Book 1) Read online

  “How are you, Val? Kids still good?”

  Garcia nodded, and replied, “Neither of them are kids any more, Mike. My oldest’s at the Academy, plebe year, and the youngest’s working on getting into Medical School.” She paused, then said, “I’m glad they’re not going to be mixed up in all of this. You heard about the junior class?”

  “I met one of them downstairs. Sharp young Ensign named Sullivan. One of yours?”

  Nodding, she replied, “And let me tell you, this is a hell of a lot better than supervising a cadet cruise. I made sure we got the cream of the crop for Leonidas. I’ll introduce you later.”

  Turning to Santoro, he added, “How’s my favorite quantum mechanic?”

  “Three months away from my doctorate, but I was getting kinda bored with that, anyway. It’s good to be back. Even despite the circumstances.” She looked at the third officer, and said, “You haven’t worked it out, have you?”

  “No,” he replied. “Lieutenant, I don’t think we’ve met.”

  “Sure you have,” Rochford said. “Though the last time you two got together, you were bouncing him on your knee.”

  Looking more closely at the young man’s face, Scott said, “Jimmy? Good God, it’s Wilson’s boy. How the hell are you?”

  “Fine, sir, and my parents both send their regards. Mum’s back in the Fleet, heading over to Achilles, but Dad’s stuck back on the farm.” Looking around the bridge, he added, “I can’t wait to get started, sir. I grew up hearing stories about this ship…”

  “Trust me, they’re all lies,” Rochford replied. Gesturing to the fourth officer, he added, “This is Lieutenant William Nguyen, an old poker buddy and our Medical Officer.”

  “Welcome aboard, Lieutenant,” Scott said, holding out his hand. “It’s a pleasure.” He looked at the doctor’s jacket, and said, “First time in uniform?”

  “Our mutual friend Clyde talked me into signing up for the Reserves last year. Something I intend to bring up at his next physical.” Glaring at Rochford, he added, “All that crap about it ‘not hurting much’? Don’t expect to hear that when I prepare your booster shots.”

  “He’s just tetchy because I can read his tells every damned time,” Rochford replied.

  Moving to the heart of the bridge, Scott said, “How’s my girl?”

  “All systems are pretty much ready, sir,” Santoro replied. “They took good care of her while we were away. I want to spend a couple more hours running some final systems checks and getting my crews accustomed to the layout, but aside from that, we’re good to go.”

  Nodding, Rochford added, “It’ll take about that long to finish loading the supplies. Don’t expect perfection, I’m afraid. We’re just putting everything into any place it’ll fit for the moment. Once we’re under way, I’ll try and bring some order out of the chaos, but I figured it was more important to get moving in a hurry.”

  “You got that right,” Scott replied. “What about the crew?”

  “We’re undermanned, of course, but you’ll have expected that, I reckon. We’re running at about two-thirds, and from what I’m hearing, that’s a lot better than the rest of the fleet. Not many junior officers, not many senior enlisted, and I’m more worried about the second problem than the first. There are a few people I can give commissions to if you approve. We’ve just about got enough officers for a Commissioning Board.”

  “Guidance Control?”

  “I’m promised someone within the hour.”

  Frowning, Scott replied, “There was a Specialist on the shuttle that brought me in. Slated to be commissioned tomorrow. See if you can grab him. He knew his stuff, and had the right mixture of humility and arrogance. No point having a pilot who doesn’t think he’s the best.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, sir,” Rochford said. Cracking another smile, he added, “Hell, given what’s going on out there, we’ll just grab him, commission him, and deal with the paperwork when we get back.” He paused, then said, “Almost all of our people are now aboard, sir. If you want to address the crew, now would be a pretty good time.”

  “Must I?” he asked.

  “I know you don’t like it, sir, but I think they’re going to need the boost. They all know what we’re facing. And for the record, all of them volunteered for space duty. I didn’t take anyone who didn’t want to go.” Glancing at protesting Nguyen, he added, “With a couple of exceptions, perhaps.”

  “For the record, I’m happy to go,” the doctor replied. “It would have been nice if I’d time to tell my staff where I was going before local security turned up. Half my patients probably think I’m rotting in detention right now.”

  Walking over to the communications station, Scott grabbed a microphone, tapped a control, and said, “All hands, this is the Captain. I’m not going to waste your time with a long speech. You all know what we’ve got to do, and you all know what we’re facing. All I will say is that nine billion people back on Earth and across known space are counting on us to work our magic once again. We’ve got a good ship, and it’s got a good crew. I’m confident that both are more than equal to the task that lies ahead. Remember your training, do your duty, and we will come through this. And damn it, we’ll do it with style. Captain out.”

  “Not bad,” Rochford said with an approving nod. “Remember Hunter? He’d have given us a two-hour lecture.”

  “And probably asked us questions on it later,” Garcia added.

  The old friends chuckled, then Scott looked at his command chair, walking over to it and taking his seat at the heart of the bridge. The hinges creaked just as they had always done as he locked down the armrests, settling back into his seat.

  “That looks good,” Rochford said. “It suits you.” Looking up at the countdown clock, he added, “I’ll go and see to the last few personnel transfers. There are a couple of damage control teams I want to steal from Colossus. Hopefully they won’t miss them.” At Scott’s expression, he continued, “Hey, this is defensive, skipper. They’re trying to do the same thing to us. I just want to get there first. It’s chaos out there. Every man for himself, at least until we get under way.”

  “Captain,” Wilson said, leaning over the sensor display, “We’ve got a shuttle coming in, top priority, right for Docking Port One. With a signal that the commanding officer is to meet it as soon as it lands.” Frowning, he added, “Not a military ship. Civilian.”

  “Damn it, I was afraid of this,” Scott replied. “I was hoping that we’d move fast enough to get out of here before she arrived.” Turning to Rochford, he added, “Our Ambassador has arrived. The President’s orders. We’ve got a watchdog coming. I don’t even know who they’ve sent, but I know that I’m going to have to tell her the facts of life before we have a major crisis. We’ve already got one war to fight. I really don’t want to start another.” He paused, turned to Wilson, then said, “Divert them to Docking Port Twelve.”

  “That’s a cargo lock, sir.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s a hell of a mess down there at the moment, skipper,” Rochford warned.

  “Good,” he replied. “Maybe they’ll turn around and go home.” He sighed, then said, “I suppose we can’t have that kind of luck. You have the deck, Commander. I’d better go and meet our honored guest in person.”

  “Give ‘em hell, sir,” Rochford said, as Scott walked back to the elevator.

  “Trust me, I will.”

  Chapter 4

  Belinsky sat in the cockpit, the chair turned back to face the passenger cabin, Novak and Patel sitting opposite. Outside, Cunningham and the others were working to assemble the scattered equipment outside, to try and determine what they had to work with while they waited for the alien ship to leave.

  “The floor is yours, Professor,” Novak said.

  “One thing first. I don’t want to face any charges. I want a pardon.”

  Raising an eyebrow, Novak replied, “I don’t have the authority to give you one. Damn it, Professor, take a lo
ok out of the viewport. Something out there has torn the guts out of two worlds and killed thousands of people. Arresting you is not high on my list of priorities right now.”

  Nodding, he replied, “It’s just that I’ve been working on this project for decades. My whole professional life, and I don’t want it to be taken from me because I had to break a few rules.” He took a deep breath, and asked, “What is your doctorate in?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You said you were a Science Officer, before.”

  “I have a Masters in Electrical Engineering.” He glared at her, and she shrugged, replying, “If my qualifications aren’t up to it, you’re welcome to try and find another applicant. Might be a long wait, though. I don’t see a line of people queuing up outside.”

  “I was rather hoping for someone with more relevant expertise.”

  Patel smiled, and replied, “Why does nobody every think that the senior enlisted have a brain? I’ve got a Masters too, and mine is in Sociology. I was planning on putting in for my doctorate once we’d finished our mission, had the paperwork all prepared to request a sabbatical. I thought your name was familiar, Professor. Didn’t you use to work at the University of Syrtis?”

  “Yes, yes, that’s right.”

  “Until they threw you out for fraud. You were damned lucky to escape jail. Last I heard, you’d gone completely off the radar. No publications for years, no reports.”

  “Idiots!” Belinsky yelled, throwing his arms into the air. “Fools, cheats and liars. That Governance Committee couldn’t find their butts with both hands and a guide dog! How dare they think that they are even remotely qualified to judge my work.” He took a deep breath, and added, “That’s the past. All in the past.”

  “Maybe you should start from the beginning, Professor.”

  “That might be best. As your friend said, I used to hold the Malek Chair of Exo-Sociology at the University of Syrtis. For the last forty years, I’ve been working on uncovering the mystery of the Great Filter. You see, we’ve gone far enough out into the universe now that we should have uncovered some sort of intelligent life. Even without an encounter with something still alive, there ought to be traces of extinct civilizations. The galaxy has been around for more than long enough.”

  “Would this be a good time to point out that we got attacked by an alien spacecraft this morning?”

  He cracked a smile, and replied, “Not quite what everyone had in mind when they dreamed of First Contact, I suppose. Anyway, I thought that we were looking in the wrong place. That there was something, some force that had wiped away traces of those advanced civilizations, removing them from existence. My theory was that some, perhaps, Celestial Watchman wanted to make sure we developed on our own, without interference.”

  “Then you thought that someone or something had deliberately removed evidence of other sentient civilizations?” Patel asked. “Interesting. The general consensus has simply been that intelligent life is a lot rarer than we thought.”

  “That’s the same crazy exceptionalism that has contaminated the field for centuries.” He paused, took another breath, then said, “I thought we just hadn’t looked in the right place. We’ve focused on planetary surfaces, when we should have been looking for sanctuaries, final redoubts. The planet below, for example. Boreas has existed for more than long enough for intelligent life to arise, and we’d see little evidence of that while it was covered in ice. In fact, that might have been caused deliberately. I wanted an expedition to search the asteroids, trying to find some sort of bunker. We’ve got similar sites at Sol.”

  “Then the money you stole…”

  “I didn’t steal a damned thing!” he yelled.

  “Only because you got caught,” Patel replied.

  Glaring at the veteran, he said, “I was robbed of that grant money. Fools and thieves not qualified to determine the merits of my work stole it from me. I just wanted to get it back. There were other sites, you see. Half a dozen of them, scattered around known space. My goal was to hire a starship and go looking, put together a proper expedition.”

  “What happened?”

  “After I was removed from my position, I managed to convince a few backers that I had something of potential interest and value.” With a smile, he said, “Think of the book sales alone from the first discovery of an advanced alien race, living or dead.”

  “I’m sure the people of Gagarin Station were thinking of nothing else when they died,” Patel said.

  “Damn it, I had nothing to do with that, and I had to watch my friends die!”

  “Believe me, Professor, we’ve been there,” Novak said, glaring at Patel. “You managed to put together an expedition. That’s what you are saying.”

  “Yes. I couldn’t get a regular permit, but I worked with a prospecting company. We arranged to get all of the records, and a contact in the government placed the official files under seal to ensure nobody would attempt to jump our claim.” He smiled again, and added, “We found what we were looking for, almost on the first try. I couldn’t have hoped that it would have been so easy.”

  “Wait a minute,” Patel said, leaning forward, eyes wide. “Are you telling me that you found evidence of a dead civilization, right here on this rock?”

  “There are a series of caverns that run all the way through to the core,” he replied. “Once we started digging, we found signs that they had been artificially altered at some time in the distant past, and altered in a way humans would not. The shapes of the passages were wrong, for one thing. The deeper we went, the more signs we found, and finally we found this.” He reached into his pocket, then pulled out a worn stone, decorated with incomprehensible pictograms. “That doesn’t match anything in the databank, Lieutenant. It’s an alien language.”

  “This isn’t…”

  “Then we found a body, deeper in the caverns. With DNA that matched nothing every recorded.” With a wry grin, he added, “I can’t wait to show this to the Board of Regents. They’ll be kissing my boots to get me back onto the faculty. The Holberg Prize is as good as mine this year, as soon as I publish.”

  “Where is the body?” Novak asked.

  “Lost. We’d shipped it, and a lot of our other samples, back to Gagarin Station for shipment back to Earth. Our backers wanted to see the evidence for themselves before sending more ships. I was going to get that full-scale expedition, dozens of researchers, everything I needed.”

  Looking at the shuttle, Patel asked, “Where did you steal this from?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “This is a Fleet shuttle, Professor. No prospecting team was going to get their hands on this. A few of them have gone astray over the years.” Looking him in the eyes, he said, “This was a Syndicate project, wasn’t it?”

  “Not my fault that nobody else would back me. I’ve got to say that so far, the crooks have been a lot more trustworthy than the so-called lawmen.”

  “Jack, you’re the expert. What do you think?”

  “What do you mean?” Belinsky protested. “He’s not an…”

  “The Professor was at the absolute top of his field, Lieutenant. His theories were always on the extreme frontier, but despite his ethical issues regarding the acquisition of funding, nobody ever doubted his scientific integrity. I’d say that we can trust him, and trust his research.”

  “Thank you for that,” the scientist said, sitting back in his chair. “Then I trust we can get back to work right away? With six of us, it’s going to be tricky, but…”

  “Work?” Novak asked. “Professor, we’ve already got a job to do, and if you think that it’s going to be easy, you’re very much mistaken. We’ve got to find a way to report back to our people, tell them what happened here, and find a way to escape this system.”

  “Futile,” Belinsky replied. “You’d never make it to the wormhole. That thing would wake up and shoot you out of the sky before you went twenty thousand miles. When it goes, it goes, but until then, I don’t intend to sit back
in this shuttle and play poker.” Cracking a smile, he added, “Though if you want a game…”

  “Not a chance in hell,” Patel said. He frowned, turned to Novak, and said, “He’s got a point, ma’am, though I hate to admit it. There’s not that much we can do down here. This shuttle’s already been configured for long-term occupation, and we don’t dare use any heavy equipment on the surface without risking detection. I certainly don’t think we should even consider a takeoff until we’ve got some sort of a plan. Even if we ran for the wormhole, we can’t guarantee that the alien ship wouldn’t simply follow us.”

  “Then what do you suggest?”

  He paused, then replied, “We set up a beacon, focusing a passive sensor array on the wormhole, ready to trigger as soon as any friendly ship comes through. We program the communications system to pulse a message when needed, one that contains all the information we’ve managed to gather up to this point, with a warning that they should seriously consider turning and running for home rather than facing that thing out there.” Turning to Belinsky, he added, “Then we might as well help the Professor with his work. As he said, it beats sitting around and playing cards all day.”

  “Besides,” the scientist added, “I don’t know why you aren’t putting the pieces together. My theory has proven completely correct up to this point. Someone has suppressed all signs of intelligent civilization across this part of the galaxy.” Gesturing at the volcanic hellhole up above, he said, “That could easily have happened before. The geologists always suggested that some sort of heavy volcanism had caused the glacial conditions down there. Given enough time, it’ll happen again.”

  Rising to her feet, Novak replied, “Are you trying to tell me that you think that thing out there launched an attack on Boreas before?”