Alpha Rises Read online

  Now this was where things were really going to get difficult, the agent thought.

  “Everyone strapped in?” El called over the ship radio. Val Pathok grunted a yes from behind him, already sitting on one of the matched gunner-control chairs, and there was a crackle of static as Irie said, “No, I’m waiting on your commands, dimwit.”

  “Ha-ha,” El drawled, as Cassandra had to suppress a snigger. She had never seen a crew as dysfunctional as this one. Half the time, the captain was barely in control of his engineer and his gunner, and most of the rest of the time, they were outright arguing with him. Were all rogue crew like this, or was she just on one of the worst ones?

  But somehow, it works, she had the time to think as the captain matched their forward propulsion to perfectly echo the gas-container above. Would any other crew from the Trader’s Belt have defied Mela security, blasted a hole out of the platform, and returned for their captain? One who hadn’t actually managed to get them any credits or loot for a long time?

  Cassandra rather doubted that. She wondered if any other crew would have stuck with their captain now that they were the most wanted celebrities in all of known space. No, almost certainly not. But Val Pathok and Irie Hanson did, and why was that? Was it as Irie had said earlier, that this gave her the opportunity for revenge? What of the Duergar? What axe did he want to grind with the military-industrial complex—other than the idea that they were a ‘worthy opponent.’ But House Archival was the scholars of Coalition space, and their analysis and erudition was legendary throughout humanity. From Cassandra’s own studies, she would hazard a guess that the glue that held this little team together was exactly the same as what drove it apart. Malfunction. Recklessness. Defiance. The very things that made them unable to fit into Coalition society—or any other structure or organization, really—meant that they were perfect for each other.

  Or at least she hoped, because what was coming up next was a challenge that not even the most deadpan agents or the strongest marines would rush into.

  “Just two left,” Cassandra whispered, as the third container ship ahead of them warped out in a ripple of energy. The captain nodded and flicked on the communicator.

  “Irie. Set up the coordinates for Armcore Prime,” the captain said.

  “Aye, aye,” the words came back. The coordinates for metal station-world of Armcore Prime was no secret. Who would be fool enough to launch an attack on the leading supplier of arms and armaments to the Coalition?

  They would be, Cassandra thought once again of this rebellious, ragtag crew, before amending it. We would be.

  “Coordinates set,” Irie announced.

  Whumpf. The second container ship jumped. One more in line.

  “Right, I’m running an open scan on warp signatures,” El stated, mostly for the benefit of Irie, Cassandra noted. On her screens at his side, she could see the sensor screens suddenly wash with energy, almost whiting out the entire array as they were this near to the jump point.

  “As soon as the ship above us starts to cycle up, I want us matching their jump signature, got that?” the captain said.

  “Aye, but, Captain? You forget the relative engine sizes.” Irie pointed out. “They’re hauling a couple hundred more tons than we are, our engines will cycle faster than that.”

  “Can you adjust, so that we jump at exactly the same time?” El said. Although he was an excellent flier and a passable space navigator, Cassandra could tell that the gaps in his knowledge were precisely the parts that he relied on Irie to fill.

  “I can, but there will be feedback. Two warp engines kicking simultaneously?” Hanson sounded dubious. “The overload on the physical stresses could tear us both apart.”

  El hissed in annoyance. “We’re committed now, Hanson. Solve it. I have faith in you.”

  “‘Course you do.” To her credit, she didn’t argue, but presumably got on with the job.

  Whumpf. The last container ship ahead flared white, and then they were alone at the front of the queue. Their warp sensors were white once again, slowly gaining color as the signature faded.

  A moment later, Irie’s voice returned. “I’ve got a solution. We’ll cycle our own jump one-step out of sync with the container ship, and if I can time it right, then we can ride the event-wave just behind them. Like throwing a rock behind a wave, giving it more force, not conflicting with it.”

  “Whatever you say, Hanson. Just get it done.” El’s eyes were fixed on the warp sensor.

  Casandra glanced out ahead. The shifting of the stars had melded back to normal and were just stopping to waver as the old warp signature faded into sub-quantum levels. The agent imagined that the personnel above them would be even now looking at their own sensors, making their calculations.

  The sensors started to flare a dull white line, growing larger and fatter by the moment. “It’s starting,” the captain hissed.

  “Wait, wait…” Irie said.

  The sensor reading reached half the screen, and wilder, more erratic lines of color pulsed out from the middle. The container ship’s warp engine was cycling hard and fast—and now Cassandra could feel it in her guts too—a premonition of wrongness, of dimensions and geography and space folding and refolding into each other in a way that her human brain wouldn’t allow.

  “Cycling warp engine,” Irie stated, and the Mercury juddered with the kick of spectral energies. Cassandra could feel the weirdness lengthen and deepen, her perspective started to shift, as if one part of her brain, a normally dormant, silent partner, was trying to tell her something important…

  The warp sensor was now almost completely white, and the Mercury was shaking with the energies and forces washing against its hull from the container ship above.

  “This had better be right…” El said, and Cassandra had the sudden, oblique sense of déjà vu as she appeared to hear the words in stereo. Warp effects could be like that, convincing you that you’re in a dream, or experiencing two places at once, or even stranger realities…

  “NOW!” Irie shouted, just as the sensors reached their maximum and the space outside the window was a sliding, surreal mess of light.

  Whu-WHUMPF!

  The double-kick of two warp engines tearing apart reality, a fraction of a second out of step with each other.

  In the cockpit, Cassandra felt herself become impossibly small, and the entire universe opened inside her mind. And then with a jerk, they were back in normal three-dimensional space.

  “Are we here? Did we make it?” the agent breathed.

  “Waiting for system reboot…” El said, staggering slightly as he held onto the wheel. Every console screen was a haze of color and flaring light as they tried to recalibrate toward the nearest satellites and drones, seeking coordinates, seeking confirmation that they hadn’t left an important part of their ship elsewhere in the spaces underneath the stars…

  FZZT! “Location Acquired: Armcore System, Armcore Prime,” the computer said in its tiny, electronic voice, and Cassandra joined the captain in an excited whoop.

  “You bloody beauty, Hanson! Remind me to buy you dinner!” El shouted happily.

  “You’ve been threatening that for years, Captain.” She sounded tired, but content with what she had done.

  “So, let’s take a look at the beast, shall we?” El ordered the console screens to merge into one giant picture of what the cameras on the outside of the ship could pick up.

  “Oh.” Cassandra heard him say before she looked up. There, in front of them, was a war fleet.

  11

  Prime

  Armcore Prime was a dead world. Dead, in the sense that it was man-made, a metal octahedron like a giant child’s toy rolled into the vastness of space. But it was not dead by any other measurement, clearly.

  The metal world was about as big as Tritho had been, the captain thought, which meant that it was a small moonlet by normal standards, but a vast space station in mechanical terms. It spun slowly on its own axis, and the crew of the Merc
ury Blade could see distant petal-ports opening and closing on its faces, eating and disgorging smaller ships, everything from the tiny one-person shuttles to massive warships. Landing and warning lights flickered on and off all over the metal almost-sphere, and its edges where frilled with antennas and receivers. The captain could almost feel the ominous threat flooding out of the thing, like a baleful star.

  It wasn’t just the appearance of this man-made wonder that had given the captain and the rest of the crew pause for thought of their choice of actions, though.

  Around the entire planetoid flashed a sea of orbiting drones, and, as they watched from their position under the container ship, they could see the slight flare of green and the wavering of lights around them like looking at a torch through water. This was the security grid that the House Archival files had warned about, a net of energy fields around the entire world. An engineering feat never before accomplished, or dared, by any of the noble houses, as far as anyone knew.

  “The energy costs of that…” Cassandra muttered. It was phenomenal, the captain agreed. Enough to power an entire civilization.

  Outside of the field there extended floating, stationary ‘ranks’ of battleships, war cruisers, and assault craft, expanding from all sides in a vaguely star-like formation. Eliard could see the super-massive frigates and cruisers, doubtless sheltering dozens of the asterisk-like war boats inside, alongside hundreds of the assault craft. In another adjacent arm sat the stationary support vehicles, blocky things like the container ship above them, but whose sides and nose were great flaring panels of hardened poly-steel to protect them in the midst of stellar battles as they refueled or transported their precious cargoes to the front lines.

  El tried to imagine the destructive power that he was looking at here and failed. Enough firepower to wipe out the Coalition entirely. What he had seen at the Trader’s Belt worlds, and the destruction of several of the bases of the non-aligned merchants, was nothing. That had only been one cruiser and a smattering of warships. Here, there were hundreds.

  But strangely, although the captain was scared, he did not find in his heart a wish to back down. Instead, he felt that dangerous thrill of excitement. Like the time that he had stolen the Mercury Blade, or the first time that he had successfully pulled off a pirate mission, or escaped the long arm of Armcore. He could do anything, and this would be the greatest heist ever. Apart from maybe breaking into the Imperial Palace itself, he considered.

  Looking around, he found that his enthusiasm was mirrored in the predatory glare of Val Pathok behind him. The captain knew that the Duergar would see what was ahead of them as a challenge, not as folly. And Cassandra? When he turned to her, he saw that her eyes were fixed, and she was biting her lips in concentration. She’s ready for this too, he thought.

  Above them, the container ship had slowed to a crawl, as it was doubtless waiting for its clearances to approach the drone grid. El knew that they couldn’t wait underneath it forever. Sooner or later, the sensors would pick them up.

  “Well then, crewmates!” he said with a careless grin. “Shall we begin?”

  He was answered by nods, and with a small pause and a prayer, El released the trigger controls and launched the explosive charges.

  The shots had been very carefully targeted. Both Irie and Cassandra had spent a large part of the surreptitious journey under the gas-harvester programming to the micro second how the weapons would fire and when.

  Val had been most annoyed that it wasn’t him in charge of the actual firing mechanism—as it was his right as lead gunner, after all—but to mollify him, El had to agree to let him detonate the charges at the required time instead.

  It was a pinpoint operation, but it was one that El knew that the Mercury could pull off. He fired the two small putty charges from their railgun. A single burst, using hardened putty shells so that they wouldn’t even damage the hull of the container ship when they made contact.

  “We’re attached?” El called, and Cassandra swept the sensors to reveal that yes, two charges were now in place near the rear exhausts. “We won’t have a lot of time afterwards…” he said.

  “Wait!” Irie called out over the communicator. “We need to wait for the security pattern to shift…” She was referring to the wave of energy that pulsed around the field, leaving a small dead zone behind it, which allowed the drones to not overheat from continuous usage.

  “You give the command, Irie,” El said hastily. “When you have the timing right, tell Val…” He couldn’t afford the hesitation that conveying the information through him would allow.

  “Okay, five, four, three…”

  “We’re coming for ya!” Val flexed his large claws on the firing pin of his control stick.

  “Two, one—now!”

  Val hit the controls, and less than fifty meters above them, the charges they had fired at the container ship went off.

  It was an industrial container, and the charges had to be small, but it was just enough and at the right place to cause a leak of the compressed stellar gases inside. The star stuff was loaded with essential elements, charged and compressed into a viscous state. It was also highly unstable.

  “Go!” El hit the thrusters and pulled the Mercury out of the way of the blast as the container ship rocked to one side, peeling from its side as sprays of blue-purple gel started to erupt from its pressurized interiors.

  If Irie timed it right, we will enter the energy field just after the phase has washed past. The captain kicked the boosters straight toward the nearest drone. They would register him—if they had a chance to. Behind the Mercury Blade was an unfolding blossom of flame and light. They had calculated that it would be too much for the out-of-power drone, but who knew, for sure, what Armcore was capable of?

  The container ship was compartmentalized, and designed to deal with ‘accidents’ and assaults so none of the personnel in their forward cab would get hurt, but it would cause an almighty distraction at precisely the right time…

  El saw a shift in the light of the stars behind the metal world. Was that the energy wave? Was it still up and running? Had they mis-timed it? There was no way of stopping to find out, and nothing to do but to kick more power into the booster rockets as he turned the ship’s wheel and cut a curve past the nearest drone-satellite, slicing through the energy net.

  El held his breath.

  Nothing crackled. There were no sudden alarms. The Mercury Blade did not suddenly get electrified by Armcore’s energy grid.

  “Did we make it? Did we?” he hazarded a look at the consoles at what was behind them. Had the fleets of stationary ships started to rush toward them? Hot on their trail?

  No. But something far worse had. The container ship was half-opened like a tin can, its engines a mess, but its forward half and compartments were still in pristine condition. Without any means of slowing or stabilizing its movement, however, it was spinning toward the energy grid in slow motion, growing larger in their screens.

  “Punch it!” Cassandra screamed, and El didn’t have to be told twice. Ahead of them was the baleful egg of Prime, and he threw the Mercury, the fasted racing boat in all of human space, straight at it.

  On the screens in front of them, however, El and Cassandra could clearly see the mayhem that they had caused unfolding behind them. The container ship slowly rolled into the drone’s energy grid, and green light flared over its surface, crackling and reaching along its metal as it pushed back, but the container ship was too big. Its body had already smashed into at least three of the nearest drone satellites, creating puffs of flame and light.

  “Holy crap,” El breathed. The container ship was slowing, but there was now a rough trail of wreckage through Armcore Prime’s defense grid. “Well, we wanted a distraction, right?” he murmured, earning a worried look from Cassandra, and then a look of horror.

  “Captain, pull up!” she shouted at the screens.

  El looked. The metal skin of Armcore Prime was all around them now as they
rushed toward its crenelated surface, crisscrossed with pipes and units. The captain seized the ship’s wheel and pulled, bringing the nose up just in time so that the underbelly of the Mercury scraped along one of the hexagonal surfaces to a fiesta of sparks and fire. Antennas and struts were snapped and thrown into space behind them, their ends still fizzing with electronics.

  “Whoa!” El turned into the slide, shifting the scraping ship away from a particularly large-looking bulkhead before they slid to a halt in a nest of smaller antennas, catching them like a thicket. With a groan and a lurch, the Mercury rocked back into place, thumping on the hull, and stopped moving. Alarms inside the Blade were going off, and the sound of hissing could be heard from somewhere.

  “Crew, report! Anyone hurt?” El demanded.

  “Gurgh!” Val shook his head, still strapped in. “Good.”

  “I’m okay, Captain. Nothing that a fancy dinner won’t fix,” Irie groaned over the communicator, and in agreement, Cassandra tapped her seat harness that she was okay too.

  “Good. Damage report?” El asked, and the computer started flashing its diagnostic tests.

  Defense Analysis: Uncontrolled Landing. Damage? External. Analysis? Internal Hull: Good. External Hull: Compromised. Life Support Systems: Stable. Oxygen: Stable. Engines and Propulsion Systems: Stable.

  “It could have been a lot worse,” El breathed thankfully. “Computer says that we’re good to fly, but that the external hull is compromised. We’ll need to patch her up if we plan on taking any more damage.”

  “Right on it, Captain,” Irie said, in her role as ship’s mechanic.

  “Val? That means you’re with me. Lock and loaded,” El barked, and Val undid his harness to swing out of the firing chair, already reaching for his scattered weapons.