The Alliance Trilogy Page 4

  The Singaporean war junks came through, one after another, and shortly began to spread their wings. Those wings were long-range sensors capable of spotting a skimmer ship on the other side of the system. It was only a question of collecting data and getting the right people to interpret it.

  Jörvak was on the com. “Icefall has a slipped containment field. Helsingor wants time to realign before they flood the engines. A few other minor issues popping up across the fleet. Some cases of the trips, including the gunnery chief on Anvil.”

  “They have three hours.”

  The last two wolves came through the jump. That gave Svensen his entire task force—the six warships of the vaunted Fourth Wolves, plus two Singaporean war junks.

  It was a shadow of the fleet that had shipped out eight weeks ago when HMS Blackbeard sent a short, cryptic subspace from deep beyond the inner frontier.

  Enemies. Protect Persia.

  The Alliance had rapidly assembled a mixed fleet of more than sixty ships and rushed it toward Persia, on the edge of the inner frontier. But they shed forces in every system, seeking to plug dozens of leaks back toward the Allied home worlds, as the Albion leadership nervously guarded against a massive invasion.

  First, they dropped a destroyer screen with three torpedo boats, tasked with laying down a massive minefield around a vulnerable jump point. Then Olafsen and the First Wolves had stopped to reinforce a pair of navy bases under construction in a mineral-rich asteroid belt. More ships jumped into Persia itself. Then word came of unknown ships around the rim of the inner frontier, and the bulk of the combined Albion and Hroom fleet peeled away to investigate, leaving the Fourth Wolves and a pair of war junks to continue on.

  “Icefall is drifting out of position,” he said. “Tell Helsingor to push it on auxiliary if necessary, but I need those guns shielding our beetles.”

  “Right,” Jörvak said, and got on the com again.

  Svensen stood still, thinking of past battles and past glories as he watched the small fleet arranging itself. Remembering mech suit raids, unwary merchant ships harpooned. He didn’t engage in the dirty stuff—slaving, sugar smuggling, assassinations—but if there was profit to be had in honorable combat, he was there. He’d never imagined himself a dozen systems from home, in a quadrant his people had passed through five hundred years ago and hadn’t returned to since.

  Under command of foreigners. Facing hostile powers, possibly even another alien race, who would exterminate him with no more regret than he would feel hunting elk in the boreal forests of his home planet.

  But at the same time, he had pushed farther toward Old Earth than any Scandian yet. Was there ever a man born who didn’t dream of setting eyes on the ancestral home? Maybe, the gods willing, he would be that man. But first, he had to bring Boghammer and its fleet to that rocky inner world and take control of this system.

  A mine had struck his ship. An enemy had been here.

  Chapter Four

  There were only two women on Boghammer, both foreigners, and both seated smugly in Svensen’s war hall, the small room off the bridge where he could meet with his officers or visiting star wolf captains to discuss strategy.

  He’d known Lieutenant Kelly for months now, encountering her far too often in the cramped halls of the ship, putting up with her questions and demands, and enduring the grumbles from raiders who complained that she was hogging her own berth, while the rest double or triple bunked or got shoved into the meat locker for extended periods of stasis.

  Others complained openly about the bad luck that came from having a woman on board. You could take a young man, teach him to strip a mech suit, to seal a leaking containment field while hurtling at eight percent the speed of light, but he’d always be that same superstitious kid who grew up in a fishing village on Viborg or Roskilde.

  As for the second woman, Anna Wang had come over from a beetle ship just before the jump, which would at least force Kelly to double bunk like anyone else on Boghammer, but also doubled up the crew’s superstitious worries. Svensen took a good, hard look at the Singaporean as he took a seat next to Jörvak opposite the two women.

  Wang was trim and neat in her glossy foreign uniform. Her hair was cropped short, her eyes were narrowed, and her gaze was penetrating. The emblem of a snarling tiger had been sewn to her right breast with gold thread, and there were a variety of other insignia—crescent moons and stars and such that indicated . . . well, Svensen didn’t know what they indicated and didn’t really care. Foreign ranks and awards.

  “You speak my language?” he asked Wang.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that so? Let’s hear it, then.”

  “I’ll talk when there’s something to say. But not to satisfy your idle curiosity.”

  Svensen grunted. That was certainly enough to get a feel for it. If Kelly’s Scandian accent was surprisingly good, Wang’s was flawless. Singaporean communications officers had some sort of brain implant that enabled them to quickly learn a language after a few minutes of conversation. He didn’t like it.

  “This is my ship. If I ask a question, you answer. Understand?”

  Wang turned to Kelly and spoke in equally perfect English. “Are Scandians as stupid as they are stubborn?”

  “I wouldn’t say stupid,” Kelly said. “But you have no idea just how stubborn.”

  Jörvak had been staring at the two women. Boghammer’s second always seemed more amused by the presence of the lieutenant than irritated, and Svensen had expected more of the same when Wang appeared. But his mouth turned down in a scowl at the first English out of their mouths.

  “Enough with the jabbering,” Jörvak said. “This is a Scandian ship. We’ll speak our language or nothing at all.”

  “My apologies,” Wang said in Scandian, her tone dry, bordering on sarcastic. “Now that you’re part of the Alliance, you might consider learning something besides your provincial dialect.”

  Jörvak muttered under his breath and leaned back in his seat. Svensen caught Kelly watching him, and the wheels seemed to be turning in her mind. He pressed on before the situation moved in unwanted directions.

  “Before I hear about the mine, I want full scans of the system,” he told Wang. “Have you got them yet?”

  “It’s a big system. We’ll be at the planet before we get a complete picture. But we’ve got a decent lay of the land.”

  An image of the system rose above the table. It was an Albion display, newly installed, more for effect than anything practical, but he liked the way it unfolded the whole system as if it were comprised of close physical objects, ignoring vast distances in favor of showing the relative position of the star, its planets, moons, and asteroid belt. The jump was a bright blue point near the second farthest of the gas giants. Only one.

  “Where are the yellows and reds?”

  “There are no unstable jump points,” Wang said.

  “None at all?”

  That was a surprise. He’d known the system was a cul-de-sac, with only one way in and out, which was why it was so far off the beaten path, but he hadn’t taken it quite so literally. You didn’t jump a red, ever, but a yellow could be a safety valve. Emergency only. Like leaping out of a two-story building to escape a fire and hoping you didn’t break a leg or worse. Couldn’t do that if all the windows were bricked up.

  “No yellows, no reds. There aren’t even any proto-jump points,” Wang added as she tapped at a hand computer and moved the view around among the gas giants. “Nothing that triggers the sensors. Just this one point, although it’s so stable it has barely degraded at all in the two centuries since the charts were last updated.”

  “It’s stable until it isn’t,” Svensen said. “No wonder no one comes here. What kind of people settled in this gods-forsaken wilderness?”

  “Someone who wanted a quiet planet and didn’t care about trade,” Kelly said. “What about our immediate neighborhood? Is it clear?”

  Wang brought the nearest gas giant into a better reso
lution. Blue, axis-tilted, and encircled by a series of thin rings and small moons, it was unremarkable. He’d seen a hundred just like it. Svensen palmed his own hand computer to connect to the data, and looked for ships, but saw none. No wreckage, no derelicts, either. But again, good cloaking technology could baffle even Singaporean tech, assuming someone knew how to stay still, stay cold, and stay silent. Wise use of natural features never hurt. Might be something lurking on one of those moons.

  “We’ve hit it hard,” Wang said. “All active sensors. If anyone was listening, they heard us searching.”

  Svensen nodded and rubbed idly at the stump on his left wrist. “If anyone was listening, they already heard the mine go off when Boghammer came through. You’re sure that giant is clear?”

  “There might be something lurking on one of the moons, but nothing this fleet can’t handle. As for downstream, toward the star . . .” Wang looked troubled. “Something isn’t adding up.”

  Kelly had been thumbing through data on her hand computer since Wang showed the gas giant. She looked up. “I don’t like the sound of that. What do you mean?”

  “The asteroid belt is clear. The charts, the really old stuff, had it full of mining colonies. The planet is mineral poor—mining the belt was the only way to maintain their civilization. There should be all sorts of prospectors and mining vessels about. Cargo ships and the like. Probably military traffic from whatever power controls the system.”

  “So it’s abandoned,” Svensen said.

  “Completely?” Wang said. “Those things become self-sufficient after a while. And you’ll never convince a hundred percent of anyone to pick up and move.”

  “Then maybe your scanning tech isn’t as good as you thought it was. If you found nothing, I mean.”

  That brought a smile from Jörvak, but Wang’s jawline remained firm, her arrogant gaze conceding little.

  “It’s not nothing,” she said. “Worse than that.”

  She manipulated the system chart until they got to the asteroid belt. It looked like a string of pebbles wrapping around the star. Another illusion. There was so much empty space that an accurate scale would have been a handful of scattered dust on a display twenty miles wide. That wasn’t very helpful though, so you got this exaggerated view.

  It was the largest belt he’d ever seen, thick with large asteroids and up to a half-dozen dwarf planets. That explained why the inner system was nearly devoid of full-sized worlds; most of the material was scattered about here. It also helped explain why early colonists came to the system with its single jump point and its undersized planet. One could build a nice little civilization with one planet and so many mining opportunities in the belt. Except there was apparently no activity here.

  “I don’t understand,” Svensen said. “What is worse than nothing?”

  Lieutenant Kelly took over, and zoomed in on a lumpy asteroid that looked like a misshapen loaf of bread with a bite taken out of the end. The “bite” glowed orange. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Wang consulted her computer. “It’s really hot. Something hit it hard.”

  “Jörvak and I are simply countryfolk,” Svensen said sarcastically. “If you could lower yourself to explain . . .”

  Kelly gave him another look. “The glow is a visual representation of radiation. There was a nuclear reactor on that site which suffered a full meltdown.” She drew in a breath and gave Wang a sharp look. “It wasn’t a star leviathan, was it?”

  That would be bad news. If one of the strange monsters of the deep had wandered into the system searching for fissionables and other heavy metals, it could have gobbled up the colonies, then hunkered down somewhere to molt and spawn.

  “Wrong signature for a leviathan,” Wang said. “This one suffered a nuclear bombardment.”

  Svensen thought about Icefall and its deadly torpedoes. “So we’re not the only ones bringing nukes into the system.”

  “There are other hot spots, too,” Wang said. “Eight more across the belt, to be exact.”

  “There was a war here,” Jörvak said. He didn’t sound displeased. “Maybe it’s still hot.”

  Svensen felt a thrill in his veins. He shared his second’s enthusiasm. Too long skulking around, taking orders. Good to find a fight and join it. But there were questions, first.

  “That mine. Are we sure that was alien tech?”

  “It doesn’t match any known human explosive,” Wang said. She sounded reluctant to concede. “That we know of.”

  Now his pulse was singing. Svensen had been in the thick of the battle outside Persia. Not part of the glorious raider assault that had destroyed the Apex harvester from the inside, but he’d mixed it up with the ship they’d called Manta Ray, who had sent buzzards across to take prisoners. They’d fought off the attack, slaughtered dozens of battle drones.

  Boghammer hadn’t emerged unscathed, and neither had Svensen. He’d lost eight mech raiders in the attack, six crew when a stasis chamber dumped, and eight more in a forced plasma release that cooked the poor fools in the engine room. And his left hand, torn off by a knife-sharp alien beak. The ship itself had suffered enough damage that they’d spent six weeks in the yards after the war.

  “But it wasn’t an Apex mine, if that’s your worry,” Wang added.

  “That isn’t worry you heard.”

  She shook her head. “No sign of Apex anywhere in this corner of the sector. Those radiation patterns don’t match their weaponry, either, and neither does the residual we picked up from the detonated mine.”

  “Anyway, we’d see harvesters in orbit around the planet,” Kelly said.

  Disappointing.

  Jörvak cleared his throat. “About that planet.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Kelly said. “Is it also glowing?”

  “I can’t examine the surface from this distance to see if there was an all-out nuclear attack,” Wang said. “Too much atmospheric noise, and there’s an active solar storm to fight, too. But there are a few battered orbital fortresses in orbit.”

  Wang said this while zooming past the asteroid belt and down to the single rocky planet of the system. It was on the small side, maybe sixty percent of an Earth-sized world like Albion or Viborg, but big enough to have habitable gravity, warm enough for oceans, and with a good portion of the surface continental landmasses. A decent moon, an eighth the mass of the planet. Three orbital fortresses—captured asteroids hauled in to serve as planetary defenses. The fortress at the equator appeared to be a counterweight for a space elevator as well as orbital facilities for repairing spaceships.

  The planet may be small, may be off the spacelanes, but the whole setup was typical for human-settled worlds. The charts were old and incomplete, and so nobody knew exactly who had settled here—some adventurous colony during the height of the Great Migration, probably—but this was clearly a human system.

  Unfortunately, all three fortresses had that same orange glow as the asteroids. The settlers might have thought they’d be protected in their cul-de-sac system, but someone had found them.

  “So they’ve been nuked, too,” Svensen said. “Is the space elevator down?”

  “Severed,” Wang said. “The ground apparatus is obliterated. Most likely nuclear again.”

  He pushed back from the table, prepared to stand. “Seems clear what happened here. And obvious what needs to be done.”

  Kelly raised her eyebrows, and Wang looked amused, of all things.

  “It’s not at all clear to me,” Kelly said.

  “Someone came into the system, nuked the planetary defenses, wiped out the system fleet and its mining colonies. If the invaders were humans, they landed and conquered what they found. If they were aliens, maybe they enslaved the population, maybe they exterminated it.” He shrugged. “Either way, we’ve still got to clear out what we find and make it safe for the Alliance fleet.”

  “You can’t conquer a world with a few hundred raiders and a fleet of eight ships,” Kelly said.

 
“Don’t see why not. That’s what we came here for, isn’t it?”

  “There could be millions of people down there.”

  He scoffed. “Go back to the Royal Navy, Kelly. We’ll figure out the torpedo systems on our own. There aren’t millions.”

  “What do you know?” she said, tone belligerent.

  “For one, we can’t see an enemy fleet—bet they all landed on the surface and are either in the middle of subduing the locals or are just getting started laying down their new colony. Maybe they’ll get off the ground thanks to that little mine that hit us. Maybe not. Your beetle ships should give us enough warning to make a run for it if something nasty comes up we can’t handle. But I’m going to assume not. I’m going to assume there are humans on the surface, and that belt is still rich with metals and fissionables. We have all the reason in the universe to get in there and take command.”

  Wang tapped her computer, and the display vanished. She rested her hands neatly in front of her on the table. It was clear the Singaporean captain wanted to say something, and Svensen, on the verge of kicking all three of them out of his war hall, turned to her with an exaggerated gesture. Well?

  “After a nuclear attack, the radioactive isotopes decay at a predictable rate. This nuclear assault occurred thirty-eight years ago.”

  “Huh? Can’t be.”

  “The math doesn’t lie,” she said.

  “Neither do the facts,” Svensen said. “The mine was next to the jump point. Those jumps migrate—which means the mine was only just laid down.”

  “Exactly,” Wang said.

  Now he did feel stupid, and couldn’t help but voice that stupidity aloud. “The nuclear attack was thirty-eight years ago. So there could be millions of enemies on the planet by now. But why put down a mine?”

  And then the answer came to him. The enemy—whoever had taken command of this system, human or alien—was still around, all right. And they’d been expecting newcomers.