Books One to Three Omnibus (Armada Wars) Page 15

  Today, near the end of the first week of his latest cycle, was a very bad day to annoy Rendir Throam.

  He was using drop sets on the leg curl, and racked up the weight to increase the resistance on his muscles. It took literally seconds to move the pin, nowhere near enough to fill the thirty seconds of rest time he was allowing himself between these sets. He watched the idiots some more.

  They were still chattering away. The one standing in the squat rack had not yet moved in any way that looked like an exercise. Two of them had quite defined chests, and reasonable enough arms considering they were serving on a starship rather than in a MAGA unit, but every one of them had skinny legs.

  Quads? Thighs? Calves? Nah brah, curls and bench press! What day is leg day? No fucking day, that’s what day.

  And they had the nerve to stand in the squat rack.

  Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Rest period finished. He started the next set, pulling the weight away from the deck plates by contracting his hamstrings. The movement up was explosive; on the way down, he allowed his quads some benefit by lowering the weight slowly, controlling the descent.

  Out of sheer surprise, he nearly lost his rhythm when he saw the one in the squat rack lift up the barbell that was suspended between the stands. Surely he was not truly removing weights from it? Yes, and his friends were helping him. Throam knew from the colour of the weights that they had taken eighty kilos off the bar, leaving twenty behind.

  Twenty kilos. Even with those skinny legs — and even though I would normally advocate pushing just beyond your limit, not doing ego reps — have some self-respect man. A child could squat more than that!

  He nearly spat out his own tongue when the curling began. Biceps curls. With twenty kilos. In the squat rack. More than anything in the many worlds, he now wanted to break a skull.

  Once upon a time, it would always have taken chemical assistance to make Rendir Throam this angry. His mothers had raised him to be the stoic, the reed that would bend in the wind. These days though, truth be told, his rage was not just a combination of pharmaceuticals and the provocations of skinny flight deck officers. He had for a few years now secretly found it easy to get angry at almost anything, ever since Thundercunt had left with his son.

  What a bitch.

  He used the anger to fuel the next contraction, and the padded roller bashed hard against his glutes. Perhaps a little too much fuel, Rendir.

  He could not bring himself to use her real name any more. Thundercunt seemed perfectly appropriate, given the circumstances, and the more he thought about what she had done the more he favoured it over her real name anyway.

  Again, foam rollers slammed against his glutes.

  The boy was not even a year old when Thundercunt had spirited him away to some desperately obscure world near the Orion arm’s core-ward fringe. Throam had been on a three-day training exercise at the time, and he had come home to a written note. It was just over half a page long.

  Rollers slammed against glutes.

  Caden had wanted them to go and confront her together, even if he was just there for moral support and did not actually get involved. He was good like that. “I had my father in my life for just about twelve Solars, and that wasn’t nearly enough,” he had said. “You owe it to your boy to do whatever you need to do.” But the time was denied to them. No, the answer came, your mission will be here, until then. And after that, you will do this. And so on.

  Rollers, glutes.

  It was not even as if she did not know what she was getting at the time. Throam had hardly changed while they were seeing each other, and he was much the same near the end of their relationship as he was at the beginning of it. If the strict requirements of his duties bothered her so much, if she resented the time his gym sessions stole from her, if she found him even half as distant as she claimed, then she might have said something about it before they had made a fucking baby.

  Rollers.

  There was a hand, which magically intervened, and the foam roller slapped against the palm and fingers instead of his buttocks. He looked back over his shoulder to see Eilentes smiling down at him, the corners of her mouth turned up sweetly and her eyes narrowed with those tiny little creases in the corners, the ones he had always thought were cute. Ten Solars had somehow failed to deepen them.

  “Getting carried away?”

  “Euryce, I didn’t see you.”

  “No, I guess not. You were off in your own little world.”

  He smiled like a boy who had been caught out. “You know me.” He unhooked his legs from the curl and swung them around to sit on the bench. “I love my own little world.”

  “One day you won’t come back,” she said.

  “I’ll always come back, as long as you’re here.”

  She smiled knowingly, tipping her head to one side, and walked off in the direction of the cross trainers. As if she had just decided on a reply, she paused half way and turned around. “When did you suddenly decide that?”

  “As soon as I saw you aren’t wearing a sports bra.”

  Eilentes gestured rudely at him, but her expression betrayed her. She clearly approved of his observation skills.

  She started up a cross trainer, and her arms began pumping back and forth, legs swinging on their plastic cradles in opposite time. Throam could not take his eyes off her buttocks. He was transfixed.

  “Hey Euryce,” he shouted.

  She looked over her shoulder and raised her eyebrows inquisitively.

  “Fancy a fuck?”

  Her smile was his answer.

  — 12 —

  Operation Seawall

  Stiletto and her companions sliced out of the bound wormhole purposefully, still in formation. The Laearan gate had done its job perfectly, drawing the terminus near and tightly dampening the turbulent churning of the spatial passage.

  “Report,” Pensh said brusquely.

  His COMOP, a young woman in her mid-twenties, flicked her eyes up from her holo. “All systems normal, Admiral. Good jump.”

  “Good jump indeed,” he said. “The other ships?”

  “Dagger shows green lights. Sai reports she has taken damage: minor enmeshment event.”

  “Serious?”

  “It’s coming through now, Sir.” She studied the data that the injured ship was sharing with Stiletto. “A small breach in their auxiliary life support system. Not critical, but it will need attention sooner rather than later.”

  “Instruct Sai Actual to make dry dock at Fort Laeara immediately. I want that ship battle-ready again as soon as possible.”

  “Aye, Sir.”

  He rose from his command chair and stepped fore, towards the wide view port that fronted his carrier’s command deck.

  The vista was breathtaking. Stiletto was on a direct course for the fortress, headed away from the blindingly white Laearan star. Ahead, the massive bulk of Fort Laeara sat squatly and obstinately dead centre in Pensh’s view. But it was not the station that was so impressive.

  Between the carrier and the station lay the Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, and Eleventh fleets of the Imperial Combine’s naval armada.

  Set in the inky dark backdrop of intra-stellar space, ablaze in the direct light from the star behind him, the hundreds of ships reflected enough light back at Pensh to make him shield his eyes. He was not sure if it was the view port compensating or if he simply became accustomed to the glare, but either way within moments he was able to look again. The scene had lost none of its impact.

  He saw frigates and destroyers, corvettes and carriers, battleships and dreadnoughts. Here and there were variants — light hulls, heavy hulls, even the ungainly torpedo boat modification. Glistening like so many shards of a splintered diamond, they meandered slowly around the star in sympathy with the nearby fortress.

  In amongst them all drifted Guardian Shields, each a vast, roughly hewn dish propelled by a long drive module stemming from the centre of the aft surface. No two of the Guardians were ex
actly alike.

  “Incredible,” he murmured.

  And there, near the middle of the armada, his attention was drawn to a heavy dreadnought, easily twice the size of the next largest ship. Across its dorsal surface he saw a pink blob, and knew even at such great distance that it was a huge painting of a clenched fist. It could only be the Love Tap, Groath Betombe’s irreverently named flagship.

  The moniker made Pensh wince every time he heard it mentioned — especially at high level meetings — but Betombe’s ship-naming policy was tolerated by Fleet Command, if only on the basis of recognising his contributions to liberty and security. There were much more colourful and dubious names in the Fourth Fleet. Betombe might well be a strategic genius, but Pensh suspected quite strongly that the old coot was also barking mad.

  “Contact the fortress.” He turned briskly to face his COMOP officer. “Find out where Fleet Admiral Betombe is, and whether or not he expects to see me in person.”

  “At once, Admiral.”

  • • •

  Captain Santani had changed her whole attitude toward Caden willingly, the moment she heard about the bodies of the three Viskr commandos. That tiny ball of rock at the edge of the Deep Shadows had turned out to be significant after all. He had been right, about Herros as well as Echo. She hoped he had not taken any of her earlier objections to heart; after all, she had only been looking out for her crew.

  Now, in the wardroom of her beloved Hammer, she waited with quiet patience as the Shard discussed his mission with — for some reason she could not fathom — a minor intelligence drone based back at Kosling.

  “Any luck with the examination of Gemen Station?” Caden was asking.

  “Nothing of any real use,” said Brant’s hologram. “We got plenty of DNA and fingerprints, but all of them from people who were supposed to be there.”

  “The computers?”

  “They knew what they were doing: wrote over the record blocks with multiple passes of gibberish. Even the holographic storage couldn’t survive that.”

  Caden sighed. “Well, the link between Echo and Herros is pretty clear, even if we don’t understand quite what it means.”

  “Agreed. My seniors have been apprised, and they’ve informed the admiralty. Fleet Command have started mobilising already.”

  “I gathered; we already said goodbye to Admiral Pensh. He’s been ordered to rendezvous with Betombe in the Laeara system.”

  “Things are moving quickly.”

  “Too quickly. We’ve been down this road before, and so have the Viskr. You’d think everyone would have learned their lesson by now.”

  “Apparently a few people missed that day at school.”

  “You know, the sooner the fighting starts, the sooner those weapons of yours will be deployed. I could really do with knowing what the worst case scenario might be.”

  Brant was silent for a few moments, and Santani found herself wondering if the holographic projector had frozen up. But no, his eyes closed and he exhaled slowly.

  “Assuming just one warhead were to be deployed against any given target planet, the Viskr could erase our Perseus arm colonies in a matter of months.”

  “What are they?”

  The Shard’s tone was flat and edged with ice, his lack of patience now so brittle and demanding that he was unable to hide it. Santani gathered from the context that Eyes and Ears had been keeping information from him. She found herself leaning forwards in anticipation, but no answer came.

  “Brant, what are they?”

  “You know what will happen to me if anyone finds out I told you.”

  “I know the risks. But then I also know the Empress. Whatever your supervisors have to say about it, they’ll be over-ruled.”

  “You’d better be right about that.”

  “I guarantee it.”

  Brant flashed a half-hearted smile, but his face dropped again as he gave his explanation. “Their short name is Atmospheric Dispersal Warheads. They’re designed to introduce biotoxins into a planetary ecosystem.”

  Santani finally leant her voice to the discussion. “Is that all? Biowarfare? That’s been around for centuries.”

  “Not like this,” said Brant. “Nothing like this.”

  “Go on,” said Caden. “You told me before these were chemical weapons, not biological. I’m guessing the other shoe is about to drop?”

  “Yes. The warheads themselves aren’t biological. But they do contain a unique chemical substrate. It’s that part that’s the real innovation. What makes them so terrible.”

  “What does this substrate do?”

  “It protects the payload. Many of the most virulent and horrific diseases are also desperately fragile when they’re exposed, when they’re outside the body. This system shields them from damage.

  “The warhead enters an atmosphere and cruises at altitude until it has dispersed the substrate as a fine mist. The payload remains insulated from the environment. Wind and rain spread it far and wide, letting it percolate down through the entire ecosystem.”

  “Worlds…” Santani breathed.

  “And what exactly would this ‘payload’ be?”

  “Well that’s just it,” said Brant. “It could be practically any biological agent. But whatever the warheads are loaded with, by the time it’s detected it will already be attacking aggressively, and impossible to contain. These weapons were designed to create persistent ecological catastrophes, not just local infections. Global wildfire.”

  Santani felt ill. The spectre of viral genocide was much more than she had expected to hear about when she came to the wardroom with Caden. Just push a button, and below you a world dies in slow agony. The idea was appalling, and she paled. Give her a straight ship-to-ship fight any day.

  Caden however had remained as stone while Brant finished describing the weapons. “No wonder the Navy is acting so quickly,” he said. “I imagine Command will be willing to burn entire worlds to ashes if it will bury this monster. They’re not going to wait long for me to find out where those weapons are; the armada will make a pre-emptive strike while it still can.”

  “It’s like the saying goes,” said Brant. “When you steal from the devil, you had better be ready to stand and fight.”

  “It’s the fighting I’m worried about. If the Viskr have these weapons, if they know what they have, they’ll be galvanised by that.”

  “We have lead time. They’ll need to figure out how to deploy them, propagate their payloads, and actually get the things to their targets.”

  “Get rid of those first two stages,” Caden said. “They have our data and our scientists. Let’s assume their understanding of the weapons is a given, and also that they had biological agents ready and waiting before they launched this attack.”

  “Then they still need to reach their targets.”

  Santani had some colour back in her cheeks now the conversation had moved on. “What’s to stop them opening a wormhole directly in the path of a target planet, and dumping a warhead through it?”

  “Range,” said Caden. “Our gates won’t respond to theirs, so any wormholes they open will be unbound. Firing warheads through an unbound wormhole would be like shooting while blindfolded. They’d never hit the target.”

  “If the warheads got through at all,” Brant added. “The longer an unbound wormhole is, the more violent the passage. Chances are they’d break up in transit.”

  “I see where you’re going with this,” Santani said. “The trick then is to use our fleets to press their borders; deny them the close range they would need to use offensive wormholes.”

  Caden nodded. “Exactly. That way we only have to worry about defending the colonies from launches made from ships, which are much easier to detect ahead of time and present us with larger targets.”

  “Well I’m glad that’s all sorted out,” said Brant.

  Caden glared at him. “I take it Admiral Pensh knows all this?”

  “I’m not sure, but Betombe will. I�
��d bet my life he’s already planning a line of defence.”

  “You’d be betting all of our lives,” Santani said. “Once we’re done here, ensure that you check.”

  “You want me to speak to the admiral myself?”

  “If you leave it to me or Caden, it will be obvious you’ve told us everything.”

  “Good point, Captain, good point.”

  Santani rubbed her eyes. It had been a long, long day already, and this revelation about the apocalyptic conflict they might soon face was certainly not helping. She longed for the comfort of her bunk. The sheets were fresh on that morning, and she could hear it calling to her.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “Yes,” said Caden.

  Damn the man. Yes he was smart, and yes he had been right. But didn’t he love the sound of his own voice? “Go on.”

  “As far as I’m concerned, my mission is still current. It would be in everyone’s best interests if I carried on.”

  Brant looked hopeful. “What do you suggest?”

  “I’m basically back at square one, aren’t I? The only real lead is out of her head. That being said, there’s nothing to suggest the weapons have yet left Imperial space.”

  “True, but how does that help?”

  “I don’t suppose it does. Let’s go back to basics.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Brant, I want every starport, station, dock, ship and government facility between here and the edge of known space on the look out for anyone who worked on either Echo or Herros. Use names, DNA, medical records, even personal links or holos they might have registered with a city network; anything. And don’t just wait for news as it’s happening, check back two months as well.”

  “I can do that,” Brant said. “Don’t even need to run this one by Branathes. In fact I can submit those queries right now.”

  Santani drummed her fingertips on the desk while she and Caden watched Brant work, the operator biting his lip as he tapped and swiped at his holo.