Revolution, page 15
Thirty-Seven
Addison
Addison had stopped refusing, however politely the requests were phrased, and starting standing bridge watches like another one of Carlos’s officers. He understood that most of what he was doing was reminding the various crew members that he encountered that there were many more aliens out there to meet. Setting an example for future generations, as it were.
He was on Dutra’s bridge as they surveyed nearby space today.
“Sir, I think we have it,” the navigator said, turning her head in his direction.
Addison usually coiled behind the captain’s seat. He slithered around it now and approached the woman.
“Show me,” he said.
“Working from your notes, this looks like the place, Commander,” she said.
Addison watched her spin the map in three dimensions. Suddenly, he recognized the gap she was pointing at.
Had they done it? He’d thought that they still had two days of jumping and listening to find it, but maybe the barrier was thinner here?
“That’s it,” he said, pointing a long, scaled finger over her shoulder and rotating the view back and up a little bit. “This star here? That was where we found Lazarus and where he had parked Ajax the first time.”
“And where you left Shiva Zephyr Glaive, sir?” she asked with bright eyes.
“Indeed,” he agreed. “Call the Captain and ask him to come to the bridge, Lieutenant. And good job.”
Addison returned to the side of the main station and coiled. Carlos emerged from his office almost immediately, so he hadn’t been having a nap or anything.
“We’ve found it?” he asked.
“Confidence is high,” Addison replied, falling back into those training videos he had been watching for the last year.
“One hop or two?” Carlos queried.
“You feeling dangerous or precise?” Addison fired back.
“Nav, can you get us there in one long jump, assuming a short one when we figure out what the neighborhood looks like?” Carlos called to the room now.
“Affirmative, Captain,” the woman navigator said. “Commander Wolcott’s notes get more and more detailed, the deeper we get into the nebula.”
“Very good,” Carlos said. “Someone roust the admiral’s lazy ass and let Councilor Teixeira know we’re about to make a terminal jump. Oh, and all hands to battle stations.”
Addison had been expecting that. Both parts. Carlos ran a loose ship, but he also had the respect of his crew and treated them well. You could joke about admirals when people were friendly.
And Rodrigo da Silva wasn’t nearly the hard case that Pedro Santos was.
But now, they were about to leap into a system where they were expecting a Westphalian squadron to appear. Whether they were already there or not remained to be seen, but from here on in, things would get a lot more dangerous.
Addison moved to a spot next to the sensors officer and coiled. He had the most expertise about the ships they were likely to encounter here, as well as the stars once the ship got through to the next layer, since the system coming up was a smuggler’s haven much of the time.
Anybody but Westphalia would be complete strangers to the rest of the crew, but Addison knew how to contact them and hopefully not cause them all to flee like mad.
He needed the smugglers. Needed their contacts.
Because he had brought the war with him and they were in a race against time now.
Thirty-Eight
Lazarus
Lazarus returned to the captain’s cabin after dinner and more or less collapsed into a chair. Grace had been a step behind him through the door and stood there for a moment, watching him, before she climbed into his lap and curled up like a cat he had once known.
“I won’t ask if you are okay,” she murmured. “I know better. What’s wrong?”
Lazarus started with surprise, but then remembered that he was dealing with Grace Savidge. Geisha. Dancer. Assassin.
Woman.
Perceptive barely aimed the conversation in the right direction.
“Nerves, I think,” he replied.
“You?”
The notion seemed to surprise her, but here in the cabin they shared, in the life they were carving out, he could be free to talk.
They were just words. Sometimes he had to meander through them for a while before he found the right order. Or something.
“Pancho Oliveira turned the bow into the storm and sailed off to die,” he reminded her. “He failed and washed up on an unmarked island he thought was deserted. But he was wrong.”
“He was indeed wrong.” Grace leaned in and kissed him on the cheek before settling her forehead against his ear.
“Then he brought these strange islanders back to civilization with him, having bizarre and violent adventures, Odysseus-like along the way,” he continued. “Except that in order to do the right thing, he had to rebel against his own people. Now, he’s about to take it upon himself to hijack a future colony world and install those aliens there as refugees.”
“You’ll be a hero,” Grace murmured in his ear.
“To some,” Lazarus agreed. “A villain to others. A fool to many.”
“Second thoughts?” she asked.
“Second guessing myself is a near-constant vocation these days,” he turned to smile at her. And kiss her. He needed that reassurance. “I’m doing the right thing, but there are times when the cost I’m going to have to pay frightens me even more than just flying Ajax into a star originally.”
“Court Martial and stripped of your rank and pension?” she queried.
“That’s the best outcome I can see,” he sighed finally. “Throw in a stretch of prison time for good measure and the Rio Alliance deciding to evict Alla’s people and force them to flee back into the darkness, where they end up on one of the worlds they had originally planned, followed maybe by a wider war against the Innruld that ends up with Rio and Westphalia making species-cause against the aliens.”
“They wouldn’t do that,” she tried to reassure him.
“They aren’t supposed to,” Lazarus corrected the woman. His arms finally came up and wrapped around her now, as if he could draw heat and strength from her. “But each of us only guesses at what we’ll do until that moment when death is on the line. All I have right now is hope.”
“But it wears thin,” she said.
“It wears thin,” he agreed. “I have to keep a brave, commanding face on at all times for the others, because both fear and bravery are contagious. Crews get infected by their commander. You know me better than they do, and can see when I’m dragging. Like now.”
“So what do you need?” Grace leaned back to study him.
Lazarus thought about it, but had no answer. Chasing that squirrel around in his mind had been almost a constant thing over the last several days as they ran to grab Ajax. The return trip to where the convoy would meet would be relatively quick, so he knew he could rendezvous with them.
That was when the crazy parts would start.
He turned and studied her, almost close enough to bump noses.
For all the weeks they had shared a cabin and been lovers, there had always been some level of reserve keeping him back a little. He’d known it, but not how to bridge it. She hadn’t pushed, perhaps understanding that it was his problem to solve.
“You,” he finally said simply, watching her eyes grow big for a moment. “I always thought I was the strongest person I knew, but I know four women just on this ship that put me to shame.”
“Oh?” she asked, her voice taking on a little bit of a teasing tone now.
“You, Aileen, Alla, and Eha,” he ticked them off in his mind.
She leaned in and kissed him warmly. It felt good.
Lazarus felt some of the ball of ice in his belly start to melt as she did. He let her heat warm him.
“As a reminder,” she said after a time of necking had passed, “you might be stuck with me now.”
“I can think of much worse fates,” he grinned. “But not any better ones.”
“Think you might survive all this?” Grace grinned back.
“I might even want to,” he said. “If I’ve got your strength backing me.”
Grace kissed him and then leaned back and laughed.
“What?” he asked.
“Of course, Aileen will still need her back scritched in the shower occasionally,” Grace observed.
“True,” Lazarus noted. “Maybe we can find her a Yithadreph boyfriend in the convoy when they arrive. They will need the assistance of an expert cargomaster, so she’ll had to spend time around complete strangers teaching them the difference between their ass and a hole in the ground.”
She laughed.
“So we should turn into matchmakers?” Grace asked.
“I want everyone else to be as happy as you make me,” he said, finally understanding what had brought him down tonight.
Fear of losing her. Failure that put him in prison but where she escaped back to Yisan and he never saw her again. Or maybe she simply got tired of him and went home.
She slid off his lap and held out a hand to pull him to his feet.
“Let’s go cuddle,” she smiled. “I can see I need to remind you why you keep me around.”
“And vice versa,” he said, rising and embracing the woman.
Hopefully, it wasn’t going to be a last meal for the condemned.
Thirty-Nine
Addison
The stars on the screen felt like home in ways Addison hadn’t expected. It was like a weight being lifted off his tail.
“We’ve arrived, sir,” the woman lieutenant announced unnecessarily, turning to him with a smile on her face.
Maybe his good humor was infectious. Looking around, most of the faces he could see were smiling.
“So this is where it all began?” Admiral da Silva asked, standing next to Carlos, with Councilor Teixeira on the other side.
Addison uncoiled from his space next to the sensors officer and turned to them.
“It is,” he nodded. “We were here doing a hand-off with another ship when we got a signal out of the blue that turned out to be Lazarus in his pincke. After we nearly blew him up accidentally, we rescued the man and hauled him out of the nebula back to Dormell, where the adventures really began.”
“So where do we go from here?” Teixeira asked. “And did we beat the supposed Westphalian force?”
Supposed because nobody had seen them yet, but hopefully they had arrived first. Dutra had been cutting corners for speed, and a five ship squadron would be that much slower as every vessel had to rendezvous after a long jump and get organized.
“Sensors?” Carlos called out.
“Negative on other signals, Captain,” the woman replied.
Addison nodded. It felt right. You had to thread several needles to get here, although this was the most obvious spot for Westphalia to arrive, once they back-calculated Lazarus’s flight path to escape them. Safer to take a longer circuit, though.
Even if that let a sneaky Churquen steal a slither on you.
Addison reached out over the woman’s shoulder and touched a spot on her screen to indicate an orbital path.
“That ice giant is where we left the ship when we headed to Rio space,” he said. “It will look like a tiny moon in this orbit until you get extremely close, because we shut down everything and transferred all the water and oxygen to Ajax.”
“I’m looking forward to seeing your ship, Addison,” Carlos said with a smile. “Never seen one that was asymmetric before. Nav, lay in a single jump and execute. Sensors, be awake when we get there.”
“I’m always amazed at Human designs,” Addison replied with a matching grin. “There is no reason at all to make something streamlined if you don’t plan on landing on a planetary surface. Symmetry is just silly either way.”
Dutra was a long, flattened cylinder with a tapered chisel at one end and a flare for engines at the other, even though it didn’t use thrusters to move around. Just riding on grav fields, and doing it in silly symmetry.
“Stand by for jump,” the navigator called. “And through.”
Addison turned back to the other screen and studied as she pinged all the moons and junk in orbit. This was a messy system. Lazarus had managed to find a gravitationally-stable point, but it had taken a lot of processing power to prove it. And even then it was only going to have lasted for another decade or so before it degraded, at which point it would have been the luck of the draw whether Ajax spiraled into the ice giant’s atmosphere or just got ejected into deep space, never to be found again.
Shiva Zephyr Glaive was much smaller than Ajax, so it had much longer.
But he was really looking forward to standing on his own bridge again.
And maybe showing it off to the others. They needed to really understand how primitive Innruld Space was.
Addison smiled at the memory of Lazarus learning about trans-space. Knocked that poor biped right on his ass. Maybe he should do the same to the other Humans on a short flight.
“Tentative contact identified,” the sensors officer called in an unsure voice that had Addison over one shoulder and Carlos the other even before the echoes had faded.
Addison stared at the screen and muttered a mild profanity he had learned from Aileen years ago. He turned to Carlos and noted the gloating grin on the Gnashiiley’s face.
“Ya know, Addison, that doesn’t look like Shiva Zephyr Glaive,” he said. “Why would they park Ajax here and take your ship, if they were intent on doing violence?”
Addison shrugged all the way to the tip of his tail.
“I’ll ask Eha and Lazarus when we find them,” he replied. “For now, I’ll assume they wanted to sneak someplace where they could land and talk to the locals. Maybe foment some revolution or something.”
Carlos just smiled. Like maybe he’d already done the math and wanted to tease Addison some. Addison had just automatically expected Lazarus to sail someplace like Dormell or Zhoonarrim and issue demands.
He kept forgetting that Eha would be calling the shots, most likely.
Addison turned to Rodrigo da Silva.
“With your permission, sir, I’ll take a crew of engineers and some folks from the bridge, and head over,” he said. “If and when Westphalia gets here, we have them far out-gunned now. And we can leave a note here for Lazarus and Eha when they get back. Or we can wait here for a week or so and see if they return.”
“I’ve read the reports,” Councilor Teixeira spoke up suddenly. “How well would Dutra stand up against a Security Barc in combat?”
“The heaviest ones would be hard pressed to win a battle against this ship,” Addison turned to the Human woman. “A pyramid would be too dangerous to engage, but Ajax could annihilate one of those with Kirov’s Lance. I presume you wish to go to Dormell or Aceanx and scout them?”
“Possibly even open communications, Commander,” she said. “My writ from the High Council is extremely vague and open to interpretations, once we got someplace where we could acquire actionable intelligence.”
This did not sound like the politician he’d been talking to before. Erlyn Teixeira came across with those same vibes as Eha did.
Fortunately, he was used to dealing with that woman, as well.
“As long as you understand the implications to the Species Underground, madam,” Addison retorted carefully.
“Relax, Addison,” Teixeira suddenly smiled. “I have to be able to honestly tell those shits from the Humanist Bloc that we didn’t just sail up and open fire. I take you and Eha at your word, but sensor logs will go a long ways towards making our case to the general public.”
“Especially if they open fire on us without provocation?” da Silva chimed in.
“Most definitely then,” she agreed. “Not that I would ever suggest you provoke them into shooting first, just to prove my point.”
“Can they hurt us?” Carlos asked, a little apprehensive.
“Keep them nose on square, like you had Kirov’s Lance to aim,” Addison said. “Reinforce everything forward. Power the engines themselves at low draw with the generators running flat out. Have a spare escape hop programmed that you can activate if they try to surround you. Even Dutra should be fine for a couple of minutes if they open up with everything they had.”
“Would Ajax even notice?” da Silva asked.
“Not until a Pyramid maneuvered over to try us,” Addison smiled. “And they have the speed and flexibility of small moons in open space.”
“In that case, Commander, you will take command of Ajax for the time being,” da Silva ordered in a formal voice. “I will transfer my flag over there, freeing Carlos to be annoying to his own crew, and Councilor Teixeira will join us. Carlos, you get to go back to flying escort for a while.”
“Not really surprised, Admiral,” the Gnashiiley grinned. “But I would like a chance to test Dutra against a Security Barc, if they get frisky.”
“Captain,” Addison interrupted, “if they identify us as rebels or Humans, I am reasonably confident that they’ll get frisky. The Innruld stand atop a rotted column of wood, constantly working to shore it up. My job is to provide a stiff breeze or a hurricane blow, because I want to topple those bastards.”
“Trust me, Commander,” Carlos said with a hard smile. “So do I.”
“Alert!” the woman on sensors suddenly called out in a hard voice. “Blueshift detected. Unknown vessel, presumably enemy. Check that. Multiple signals inbound. Westphalian flags evident on transponders. Enemy squadron has arrived.”
Addison cursed. He’d gotten here ahead of them, and then perhaps led the enemy right to Ajax, when they never would have found the ship otherwise.
He looked up and caught Carlos’s sympathetic nod.
“All hands to battle stations,” Carlos called. “Prepare to engage the enemy.”
