Star Glory (Empire Series Book 1) Page 4

  Two black beams shot out from the two Empire ships. They touched the bow of the Dauntless.

  A yellow-orange star formed at the front of the British battlecruiser. That star quickly ate its way down the length of the ship, growing larger as the black beams ate into the Dauntless. In less than two seconds it was gone. A yellow-orange star glowed where once an ally had existed.

  “Tactical! What is that black beam!” yelled the captain.

  “Sir, sensors say it is antimatter! Negative neutronic antimatter, just like what we use for our afterburners. But it is coherent,” Chang said hurriedly. “And its range is 20,000 klicks!”

  Sadness filled me at the death of the men and women on the Dauntless. They had been good allies during this confrontation. I had never met any of her crew or her captain, but times spent chatting with other crew in our Mess Hall had conveyed what some of them knew from rousting with the Dauntless crew during our Earth orbit fueling. But maybe we could gain some vengeance for them.

  A new yellow-orange star filled the space where the starboard enemy ship had been. It glowed in the vast blackness of deep space, outshining the distant stars for a moment.

  “Yes!” I yelled. “Our antimatter afterburners killed that sucker!”

  A new image appeared in the bulkhead vidscreen. It was the otter alien.

  “Divert!” it said loudly. “Move up!”

  I looked over at the system graphic image by the Chief.

  On it were the single red dot of the closest Empire ship. Which now moved away from the ecliptic plane and upward, off of our inbound track. And thereby away from the dispersed cloud of antimatter that had been shooting out from our stern for the last minute. Kilos and kilos of black antimatter had shot out, dispersing slightly, but filling the space between us and the two Empire ships. While the antimatter did not move at lightspeed or even planetary escape velocity, still, the widening cloud of antimatter filled our vector track. The track that the two Empire ships had been following in their determined effort to close on us and then kill us all.

  Well, one of them had died from being too close to our stern vector track. And the surviving ship was now rising up and curving away from our vector.

  “Range to closest enemy ship is increasing!” called Chang. “Distance is one million four hundred thousand klicks and increasing! Magnetosphere edge is just twenty seconds out!”

  Relief filled me. My gut stopped churning. Chills ran down my neck and back. I closed my eyes, ignoring the excited words from Gambuchino and her Spacers. We were alive. And our chances for escaping death were good. Depending on what happened in the next twenty seconds.

  “Astro yeoman!” called Captain Skorzeny. “Release the Kepler 22 coordinates to Heidi!”

  “Releasing coordinates,” came a man’s voice that I did not recognize.

  “AI Heidi, orient ship toward Kepler 22.”

  “Orienting. Astrogation will regain ship control momentarily.”

  “Good.” The image of Captain Skorzeny showed him bumping his gloved hand against his clear helmet as he tried to wipe sweat from his brow. “Engineering! Activate the Alcubierre space-time engines!”

  “Activating Alcubierre engines,” the Chief said loudly as his hands touched those controls.

  The bulkhead vidscreen’s image of true space changed to gray. Only the overhead image of the Bridge and its crew people now showed. Across the room the system graphic vidscreen lost its image of twenty-five red dots that had been all too close to the Star Glory. Now, that enemy could not reach us. While the direction of our departure was easily visible from any Empire ship, they had no knowledge which star was Kepler 22. Or how far away it was. The Empire ships and Manager Smooth Fur just knew that one human starship had survived their sneak attack. And that ship had fled somewhere. And since our orientation had not been toward Sol and Earth, the Empire aliens had no way of knowing in which direction lay Sol, our colonies and eight billion humans. But how long would that ignorance last?

  I didn’t know. I just knew that my idea of releasing raw antimatter into the vector track behind us had bought us our lives, and time in which to figure out how to deal with this Empire of Eternity.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “You’re a hero,” Warren said from the other side of the table he shared with me and our friends in the Mess Hall. Which was very busy with lunch service. My Marine buddy had several sushi wraps on his plate, plus a sweet potato.

  “Bilge water.” I poked at the baked chicken breast that occupied most of my plate. Mashed potatoes, snow peas and a precious orange occupied the rest of the plate.

  “Nate, you really did save us all,” murmured Oksana from my left, where she had finished her meal and was sipping from a glass of ice tea. Our Russian émigré looked somber, as if the death of the Velikiy still bothered her.

  “You’re no hero,” muttered Bill from my right side. The redheaded dairyman from Tennessee speared a piece of guinea pig steak which dripped with brown sauce. “But Oksana is right. Much as I hate to admit it, your antimatter fart idea saved us when it killed that Empire ship and forced the survivor off our track.”

  The last member of our hang-out team laughed softly. “You did good, Nate, and that is not bilge water. For a member of the Black Gang, you do have some good ideas now and then,” said Cassandra Murphy, the only civilian at the table. Even though she was a Brit from Portsmouth, she acted unaffected by the loss of the Dauntless. Instead, the woman who was a foot shorter than me sprinkled garlic powder on the spaghetti and veggie meatballs pile that filled her plate. “And your math tutoring session is set for 1400 hours. Hope that doesn’t mess with your sleep.”

  I winced. It had been six hours since our escape from Kepler 37 and the Chief had only released me from my shift an hour ago. Which had given me enough time to hit my Residential cabin, shower, shave, put on fresh black pants and khaki shirt, check to be sure my name badge was properly aligned atop my right shirt pocket, then head to the Mess Hall for this lunch with the only people on the Star Glory who gave a damn about me. Even Bill, a proton laser gunner from Weapons Deck who regularly torqued me, supported me when any enlisted or other NCOs talked down Engineering. Or called me a Bilge Rat or Bilge Turd, terms that I had had to look up while at Great Lakes since they dated to old-style submarine and water ship days. Now I was going to miss half my sleep period thanks to the news from the only person at the table who owned a Ph.D., an M.A and a B.A. Her fields of expertise were cosmology, exobiology and anthropology, in that same order. She was my assigned tutor for the higher math I had to conquer in order to earn a master’s in antimatter engineering while on this cruise. Which now was surely going to last longer than planned.

  “I’ll manage. Have you geeks on Science Deck figured out how those Empire ships can move at right angles without showing a drive flare?”

  “Nope,” Cassandra said as she lifted a fork of red-dripping noodles to her lips. “Maybe Oksana knows. Intelligence knows everything important there is to know, right?”

  Everyone at the table laughed, including Oksana herself. She had emigrated to the U.S. at age ten to live with an aunt and uncle in New York City, then had joined the Navy at seventeen. She was now 28, held a master’s in systems management and was a Chief Warrant Officer Two, thanks to her years at DIA and with EarthGov’s Orbital Defense Systems directorate. She had volunteered to be part of the Star Glory’s Intelligence crowd, though why an armed exploration vessel needed Deep Black intelligence types had always escaped me. Still, she showed a friendly smile to everyone, was patient with people outside her department, and at six feet was the only person at the table who came close to my own six foot five tallness. Shapely even in her NWU Type 1 blue and gray fatigues, I would have asked her for a date. She was outside my staff chain of command. But she was not Cassandra, whose curly black hair framed an oval face that I had fallen for shortly after we boarded the ship in Earth orbit. It did not matter that Cassandra was a foot shorter than me. But it mattered to
Cassandra that her objective in civie life was to become top dog professor in the cosmology department at Stanford, the place where she’d earned her Ph.D. She had no time for romance. So I accepted the hour every other day she allocated to me for my study of tensor quadratics equations and similar crazy math.

  Blond-haired Oksana gave a shrug. A sign to all of us who knew her that she did indeed know something. “Well, the XO did ask us to figure out that no drive-flare maneuvering the last two Empire ships did. First to pull close to the Velikiy, then later to move off their vector track at a right angle.” She sipped her glass of tea, then put it down. Her bright blue eyes scanned the four of us. “My boss Lieutenant Gakasaki said he recalled a recent experiment by DARPA that tested a magfield spacedrive on a spysat out by the Moon. It was a proof of concept thing. DARPA wanted a spysat that could move without emitting any kind of drive thrust. Well, the experiment worked. It showed a small sat like that could either latch onto, or push away from the Sun’s solar magnetic field. Which as we all know extends out to the edge of the magnetosphere. That might be what the Empire aliens were using. And how they were able to move at 15 psol, with their magfield drive supplementing their fusion pulse thrusters.”

  “Hmpph,” muttered Cassandra. “That’s the kind of basic research which should have been shared with great universities like Stanford. Or MIT. Or GWU. They’ve all got Defense contracts. We’re loyal.”

  Oksana gave a sly smile. “Of course you are loyal. Otherwise you would not be on this ship. But civie universities and colleges are known to leak tech stuff. Which was why this experiment was tagged as Top Secret Compartmentalized.” She reached out and grabbed a coconut cookie that sat on the sweets platter in the middle of the table. “Anyway, that’s what my boss told the XO. As for how those ships moved at right angles to their vector tracks, that’s obvious. They have inertial compensators just like we do.”

  “Bet you they don’t have Marines!” growled Warren, an Aussie who hailed from Darwin. He was a full corporal in the ship’s Marine platoon and proud of it.

  “They don’t need Marines so long as they have lasers with ten times our range, let alone that fucking antimatter beam!” grunted Bill, hunching his shoulders as if ready to pound anyone who said a Petty Officer Third Class like him was no better than a basic Spacer.

  Bill’s grouchy temperament was something we all accepted. It was part of who he was. As was his fixation on proving to anyone who would listen that being a farmer, a dairy farmer, was more important work than being a rancher, like me, who only raised cattle for the export market. Still, he didn’t give a damn for rank of any sort. Which was why he sat at a table occupied by a civie research scientist, an Intelligence chief warrant officer, a Marine scout and a Black Gang petty officer like me. Around the Mess Hall were dozens of tables occupied by men and women who had been released from First Shift. But close review of the tables showed that line and staff officers sat together, NCOs and Spacers sat in another grouping, the civilians sat in a third group and the Marine folks hunkered down in one corner of the large room. The groupings were not formally required. Captain Skorzeny sometimes sat with the civies and even the Marines. Still, naval traditions were something everyone had pounded into them at Great Lakes, at Annapolis or at fleet anchorage in San Diego and Norfolk. The fact we all flew through space in a starship the size of a supercarrier, guided by astronautics that were more properly the domain of the Air Force, that mattered not. The Navy had won the fight in Congress to have humanity’s military spaceships labeled as the Star Navy. One admiral had even laughed at a hearing and said “Who ever heard of a Star Air Force, when there is no air in space?” No one on the committee pointed out there was no water in space either.

  “Folks,” I said, hoping to head off a pointless debate over tactics versus weapons. “The reality is that this Empire of Eternity exists. They control most of the Milky Way. They killed two of our ships. They are a threat to Earth and to humanity.” I looked around the table, hoping for someone to bring up a light-hearted topic like whether Brazil would win this year’s world soccer championship. No luck. People were either focused on food, or frowning or looking ready to snap at anyone who said the wrong thing. Which was likely the mood at the other Mess Hall tables, considering how we had just loss more than 700 humans in two starships that we had thought powerful enough to stand up to any group of Asteroid Belt rebels or long-lost generation ship colonists. But they had not been strong enough to defy the aliens who ran home galaxy. I looked over to Cassandra, who was munching on a veggie meatball. “Cassie, what’s your take on those aliens we saw on the bridge of that spaceship? And their leader, Smooth Fur.”

  She licked her pale lips clean, put down her fork and sat back in her chair, her expression thoughtful. “They are predators, maybe even apex predators. They breath or need oxy-nitro air. They need gravity, though the floater alien that resembles a giant jellyfish may be a high atmosphere occupant. The reptile alien resembled a Komodo dragon sitting on its back legs. The hunting cat alien at the back of Smooth Fur’s bridge was a tiger with manipulating tendrils under its chin. The other aliens on its bridge were equally dangerous looking. To me, that Empire bridge was filled with omnivore or carnivore apex predators. Not a touchy-huggy herbivore to be seen.”

  Oksana lifted her eyebrows. “And Smooth Fur? What do you think of him? He looked like an overgrown river otter to me.”

  “Okie, he’s the most dangerous of that crowd,” Cassandra said, pushing away her half-empty plate and grabbing her own glass of ice tea. “You saw his black fur with white stripes on it? That mix of black and white stripes is a warning sign to any other predator, or prey. It’s the aposematic principle. Bright colors warn that you are dangerous, so best to leave you alone.” She sipped some tea.

  “Isn’t that judging a thinking person by their looks?” Bill muttered low, as he too pushed away his empty plate. “I grant you they attacked us with no provocation. But why do we assume they are individually dangerous, rather than just following the orders of these Dominants?”

  “Because they are dangerous!” Cassie said loudly, then looked around to see if she had drawn attention from nearby tables. She hadn’t. The nearby NCOs and Spacers were arguing over who would win the ship’s lottery for liberty when we hit a safe port. Assuming such existed. “Here’s some examples. The honey badger has a mix of black and white fur, and it is a predator known for taking on other predators three times its size. Same for the skunk, whose black-furred spine is flanked by two white stripes. With white fur on its head. And the same white on black skin pattern is found on killer whales, who hunt in packs and are often called the wolves of the sea.” She pointed at Bill. “So, Mr. Professional Skeptic, you go for a swim off the coast of Alaska when a killer whale pod is cruising nearby!”

  Bill held up both arms, which showed his natural hairiness thanks to the NWU sleeves being folded back to his elbows. “Okay, okay. So I guess that means the reptile alien’s red and yellow spotted scales, the red and black bandedness of the floater and the black stripes on yellow fur of the Zorta cat alien are all signs of natural born predators?”

  “Exactly correct, my friend Bill.” Cassandra’s tone had eased its sharpness. She looked around. “People, there may well be aliens out there who are friendly herbivores, or relaxed omnivores who are not like our wolf packs on Earth. The galaxy is a big place, like Smooth Fur said. And this Empire has not visited every planet. Or found every space-going species, since they missed us. And since they still have half of Orion Arm yet to explore.” She folded her arms over her khaki jumpsuit. “But we’ve just found out that home galaxy is a jungle occupied by critters who will eat us for lunch, and then some.”

  Warren leaned forward. “Cassie, you make a lot of sense to me. So we ran into the galaxy’s top apex predators. Well, humans are the apex predator of Earth. Do you think there’s a chance there are other predator species out there who oppose this Empire? Who might become our allies?”

&nbs
p; “It’s possible,” Cassandra said, then looked past me and Bill to Oksana, who sat next to Warren. “Okie, why is the captain taking us to Kepler 22? No human ship has ever been there, according to what Magnus shared with the rest of Science Department. Kepler 22 is 406 light years out past 37. So why go there, versus anywhere else?”

  The woman with the highest naval rank at our table gave another shrug, this one different. From the few months I had known her it seemed to reflect thoughtfulness.

  “The XO did not say. Nor has anyone from the Bridge said why,” Oksana said, her hands spinning her empty glass in place. “But I think the captain is hoping to find either the underbelly of this empire or a rebel outlier. Every empire on Earth has had a criminal underbelly. And there were always outlying rebels who figured out how to escape the empire’s attention.” She grabbed another coconut cookie, in keeping with her love of chocolates, nougats and anything sweet. “And the XO did say we needed to get more intelligence info on this Empire before we head back to Earth. Plus heading to Kepler 22 takes us further into the territory already controlled by this Empire. That star is closer to the nexus of Sagittarius and Orion arms.”

  The Russian’s speculations made sense. But they added to my concerns. “Well, then we either find help or we die on the vine. We’ve only got so much DT fuel. And just three months of food, even with the fresh output from the Farm Deck and Forest Room.”

  Bill looked to me, his smooth-shaven face somber. “You going to help raise more crops on the Farm Deck, rancher boy?”

  I shrugged. “Might do that. But the food output of the Farm Deck, the fruit trees, grape vines and berry shrubs in Forest Room and the algae steaks we harvest from the hydroponic tubes in the Recycling Deck will not feed us forever. We recycle very well. And our oxy output from growing stuff is sufficient to support our crew. But we do not have endless DT fuel, which runs our fusion reactors and gives us normal space thruster power. The limits on any starship’s range have always been air and DT fuel. Unless we can buy fresh deuterium and tritium fuel pellets somewhere, either we head back to Earth within three months, or we die in deep space.”