The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) Read online

  “We’ve been out here three years now.” the 2nd lieutenant waved a hand to hold some crewmen back as they passed an intersection. The sound of alien music a harsh, driving beat, grew and faded as they passed. “BDU’s typically last a couple years of constant use, so you’re lucky we’re even wearing pants.” They came up to the next intersection and the way forward was barred by an armed guard. They took a right turn, a rat scurried down a hole in the deck grating as they approached.

  “We’re working out a deal with some suppliers down on Weirfall,” their guide continued, “but it’s tricky, considering we have very little credit, now that Earth is… well, out of the picture.” They came to another checkpoint and he looked over at the two suited visitors as they continued toward the port side of the massive vessel. “Is it as bad as we’ve been hearing?”

  “Probably worse,” Dwight answered. He saw the wince on the young man’s face and one of the Marines cast him a backward glance as they took a left at an unguarded intersection. Way to go, dumbass. They probably have family back home and no way to find out if they’re ok. “So, what are you guarding over there?” He waved to his left. “That where you keep the nukes or something?”

  “Hmm?” The lieutenant frowned for a second, then laughed. “Oh, lordy no!” The marines were chuckling now. “You don’t want to keep strategic weapons in there.” He waved a hand to his left. “Delta twenties are a bad neighborhood.”

  “’Scuse me?” Dwight blurted. “Are you serious?”

  “Oh yeah,” the officer asserted. “Any ship this big is going to have areas you don’t go into alone. Even the big super carriers back home were like that and they were a quarter the size of the Midway. Hell, I was mugged on the Grant twice before I finally pulled my head out of my ass. Remember that, Tim?”

  “It’s a miracle you got off that ship alive, sir.” The Marine on the right answered cheerfully.

  “But this is a military vessel,” Dwight objected. “Can’t you just send in the Marines and clear em out?”

  “Ho boy! You sound like I did, my first cruise on the Grant,” the young man laughed. “God she was a beautiful ship, wasn’t she Tim?”

  “Best in the fleet, sir!” Tim replied. “Even if she was named for an Army officer…”

  “Grant was also the eighteenth president,” the 2nd

  lieutenant volunteered helpfully. “Maybe that had something to do with it?”

  “I never voted for him, sir…”

  They came to one of the aft risers and their guide put his palm on the control screen. A blue glow hazed around his hand as the scanner identified him. He turned a serious face to Dwight. “Doc, you gotta understand – we sweep up thousands of kids off the streets to man ships like this. A few addicts always slip through the filter and we end up with a ready-made market for illicit pharmaceuticals.” He punched in a series of commands to start closing off access to the zero gravity shaft.

  “Where there’s a market, there’s always someone who’ll make a profit from it,” he continued. “We conduct sweeps now and then, but the labs always spring back up. They’re inventive as hell.” He shook his head in rueful admiration. “You leave a janitorial locker unattended for ten minutes and somebody’ll raid it and start cooking up some crank.” He nodded at Tim who pushed off into the shaft, bounding against the padded far side as he worked his way up toward the bridge deck.

  “It’s just a fact of life.” he shrugged, as he looked over at a green indicator that had appeared on the control panel. “Looks like we’re clear all the way to the bridge.” He turned to his two guests. “Alright, folks – time to meet the old man.”

  Symbolic Value

  Dactari Logistics Station, Oaxian Orbit

  Harry stumbled into the control room, thanks to a perfectly timed shove from one of his guards. He’d noticed a senior officer standing in the center of the round room, surrounded by a circular collection of workstations. There were at least twenty operators working at the terminals, their chatter interrupted as they turned to see the prisoner.

  Harry figured he was here for a lecture and so he ignored the officer, looking toward a large, floor-to-ceiling window that looked down on Oaxes. He strolled over, gazing down at a world that felt strangely like home, now that he’d experienced several lives on it.

  It felt as though he’d had enough of life.

  The Dactari officer behind him grunted in exasperation. He was being ignored in front of his staff. “Well, Captain Harrison Young of the United States Navy, your reluctance to talk’s been a waste of time, hasn’t it?” He had a disconcertingly perfect Texas accent. There must have been a few hundred humans run through the knowledge capsules over the last three years and their accents lived on in their enemies.

  Harry turned from the window. He wasn’t bound. Perhaps they knew how numb he felt, or perhaps the personnel in the room were considered sufficient, should he attempt anything violent. He felt dead inside, too used up to even seek revenge for the deaths of loved ones that he’d never met. He looked around the room as though he were the only one in it.

  “We know you came here to arrange a deal that effectively constitutes a smuggling contract.” The officer frowned slightly as he watched his prisoner. “We knew that you’d come here sooner or later. You can’t use all those new hulls without systems to operate them and there are precious few worlds that can supply what you need. We reckoned it’d be a back door deal like this. It contravenes the Law of Imperial Trade and Commerce. It’s a clear threat to the security of the state.”

  Harry said nothing to this. He had a pretty clear idea of where this was going. They had wrung him dry and now they only had one use for him. He would die at the hands of the Oaxian courts, making diplomacy with the Alliance all but impossible.

  The officer sighed. “You’ll be turned over to the authorities in Presh,” he said, indicating the planet outside the window. “They know how to deal with criminals.”

  There it is, thought Harry dully. A quick show-trial followed by a slow show-death.

  A technician entered through a door at the back of the room and headed for a bank of modules mounted beneath an inactive twenty-foot view screen. He knelt before a module with a blinking orange panel on it and slid it out.

  “I hope you won’t bother with false hope, Captain,” the officer said quietly as he turned to look at the tech. “The court already knows the verdict – it’s simply a matter of standing you in front of the adjudicator and having her read it out.”

  The tech slid the module back into the wall and a large screen above it came to life. Harry was looking at a stylized display of every system in the Republic, dotted with target reticules and text boxes. He was fluent in Dheema. Every officer in the fleet and at least half the enlisted personnel had been plugged into one of the capsules that had been captured after the Battle of Mars.

  “Those are ships,” he said in perfect Court Dheema, the dialect of the Dactari ruling class. “Warships, if I’m not mistaken.” He turned to the bemused officer. “You can see every Republic warship from here, can’t you?”

  “Goods flow as needed, Captain.” The Dactari officer gave the technician an angry nod toward the exit. “When a vessel needs products from this system, we know about it immediately and send out the required parts.”

  “Wouldn’t it be wise to stockpile parts around the Republic, so repairs could be conducted even faster?” Harry was trying to steer the conversation away from the idea that was beginning to sizzle in his brain, though he doubted he would live to carry it out.

  A shake of the head. “The processing cores only survive for a short time outside of a ship’s systems. They travel to the stricken ship aboard incubator vessels, but they can only keep them alive for a few months at most.” A sad smile. “And no, Captain, you will not have a chance to tell your superiors about the fleet telemetry system. You will be dead before dinner time.”

  Silent Night

  The Dark Defiance, Earth Orbit

>   Tommy Kennedy, Kale Thompsen and Gelna Tai gazed out at the Earth. The bridge of the Dark Defiance simply ended at a railing and the only thing separating them from the void was the energy shield. It was almost like standing in the mouth of a cave looking out at the night, though in this case they saw the Earth instead of the moon. It was a beautiful sight, after three years of searching out the sister ships to the Dark Defiance.

  They had found the massive ship in the depths of a gas giant. They had been left on Khola, one of the giant’s inhabited moons as embedded employees of Red Flag Minerals, an American company that was aggressively searching out commercially viable sources of Helium isotope.

  The ship had been built by an ancient race that had found themselves alone in an empty galaxy. Millennia ago, they had planted the seeds of life on hundreds of worlds, leaving a guardian vessel to tend each one.

  When the unlikely trio brought the Dark Defiance out of her long slumber, her living symbiote had been so shocked at the chaos on Khola that she’d given serious thought to sterilizing that world and starting over. Tommy had managed to talk her out of it, but knowing that a similar ship lurked in the depths of Jupiter and that others like her stood sentinel over a thousand inhabited worlds, Tommy couldn’t rest easy on Khola.

  They had to make sure Earth wouldn’t be sterilized.

  “Can’t believe I stowed away in Kale’s disgusting foot locker to get off the Völund, and I end up back here,” Gelna muttered, flicking his tail to the side in the standard Dactari gesture of disgust. “No way am I going down there. They’d lock me up for sure.”

  “We could go as projections,” Kale volunteered. “I can go to a Montreal police station and stand in front of my wanted poster – see how long it takes for someone to realize who I am…”

  “They probably took those down by now,” Gelna mused. “And I don’t think the authorities would recognize me at all if I went to Britain. They’d just assume I’m an escaped Dactari prisoner.”

  “Technically, you are an escaped prisoner,” Tommy grinned. “They didn’t exactly free you when you joined the Völund. Kale and I wouldn’t have had to carry your surprisingly heavy arse onto the shuttle in a footlocker if you were free to leave.”

  “Something ain’t right,” Kale was frowning down at the planet. He pointed. “That’s the Middle East, so that’s Western Europe.” He waved his hand toward the dark side.

  “So?” the Dactari shrugged.

  “So,” Tommy answered, “there’s almost no lights visible in one of the most highly populated and industrialized regions of the planet.” It looks like only a handful of cities have power. What does that mean?

  I can only find one signal from this world, Keeva, the humanoid mind of the ship, spoke to their minds. It appears to be a warning.

  They suddenly heard a layer of static as she fed the transmission to their thoughts. “Warning, this planet is under quarantine due to a highly infectious disease. Extreme force will be directed against any ship attempting to land on or launch from the surface. All orbital facilities are likewise off limits. Any attempt at boarding will result in your destruction.” A few seconds of silence. “Warning…” The message began to repeat and Keeva cut it off.

  Tommy’s hands gripped the railing, his knuckles white. “Whatever this is, it’s not good. Keeva, please project me on the surface. I need to find out what’s happened to my sister on Guernsey.”

  Please picture Guernsey’s location for me, Keeva replied. I’ll need to look into your private thoughts to put you in the right place.

  Nodding, Tommy closed his eyes, picturing the island as though from a satellite. He brought up his memories of the cottage as well as local landmarks. “Will that be enough?”

  Yes, I think I have the right place, she replied.

  Tommy opened his eyes and found himself standing outside a low, thatched cottage belonging to Erin, his father’s sister. If Deirdre was anywhere on earth, it would be here. He reached for the door handle and stopped, shaking his head with a grin. Taking a deep breath, he stepped through the door, seeing the fibres of the ancient wood as he passed through. He found himself in the central room. A wonderful crackling sound came from the fireplace that heated the small home. He wished he could smell the sharp scent of the wood fire.

  “Tommy!” Erin rushed over from the fireplace. “Oh, it’s so good to see you! I didn’t even hear you come in.”

  Tommy raised a hand, trying to warn his aunt but he was too late. Her hug went right through him and she tumbled onto the couch. She turned and regarded him with mild alarm.

  ‘It’s ok, Auntie.” He gave her a sheepish grin. “I’m being projected from a ship in orbit. That’s why you can’t touch me. I should have thought to warn you as soon as I came in.”

  “Projected?” She furrowed her brow. “I was sort of hoping you’d come along with a rescue team.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any official organizations left.” Tommy looked around the central room. “Auntie, where’s Deirdre?”

  “She turned in early.” Erin grinned. “She’ll be excited to see you! Deirdre…” She turned her head as she called out to a door near the fireplace. “Someone to see you love.”

  Knowing his sister was safe, Tommy remembered the other question that had been nagging at him. “Auntie, what happened here?”

  “Some kind of plague.” She spread her hands in a helpless gesture. “Within a couple of days, all travel was shut down but it was already everywhere. People were dropping like flies all over the world and that’s bad enough, but then they started getting back up again.”

  Tommy turned his head as though trying to hear her better, not sure what to say. “What?” It was the best he could do. What he had heard didn’t exactly make sense, so he didn’t feel terribly bad about the feebleness of his own reply.

  “It’s what I’ve heard,” she said defensively. “They say the dead are kept moving by the disease somehow. They keep spreading the infection until they fall apart. Thank God it hasn’t shown up here on the island.”

  “Tommy!” Deirdre was standing in her doorway in a nightdress.

  Erin held a hand up to Tommy with a grin. She wanted to see how Deirdre would react to falling through her brother.

  Tommy moved to his left a bit as his sister raced over. He wanted to make sure she would land on the couch rather than on her aunt.

  Sure enough, Deirdre found herself sprawled on the couch next to Erin. She composed herself and looked calmly at her brother. “I think that deserves an explanation.”

  Legendary Skill

  Presh, Oaxes

  Harry stared at the corroded framework of the seat in front of him, lurching as the shuttle banked to begin its descent into the massive stadium that jutted out from the upper side of the Oaxian capital. The seats of the small craft were suspended from two oval shaped tracks that ran along the underside of the fuselage. Below him and to his left, there was nothing but open air until the dome of the arena slid into view.

  The city of Presh had been built out from the sides of two adjacent mountains. It spanned above the fast flowing river below in a graceful, six kilometer arch. The stadium was on the upriver side of the massive arch so as not to obscure views of the sea, just five kilometers down-stream. The huge arena was more spherical than its Earth counterparts and the seats continued up the under-side of the dome, all the way to the two hundred meter opening at its top, known as the oculus. Focused gravity plating allowed spectators to sit comfortably while looking almost straight down on the action.

  They reached the rim of the oculus and the sound of several hundred thousand cheers hit him with sudden force. He scanned a dull gaze across the throng of Oaxians in their seats below. As they dropped through the opening, he was surprised to be hit on the cheek by a small rock. The seats near the oculus were close enough for a well aimed projectile to hit prisoners on the shuttle and the locals were eagerly shouting bets and hurling insults along with their missiles.

&nbs
p; His memories now included dozens of Oaxians and he understood that this antiquated craft had been used for centuries to bring condemned prisoners to their public deaths. They would be dropped, two by two, to fight over a knife. The victors of those skirmishes would hunt each other until only one remained. That victor’s life was then left to the crowd’s mercy. Those who stood were voting for a pardon while those who sat were voting for death.

  How you conducted yourself in the arena made the difference.

  They were bathed in the roar of the crowd now and a sudden cheer sounded just as the seats slid toward the rear of the craft, the two rearmost seats rotating inward and folding into a housing where they would ride back to the front. The shuttle banked to head for the next drop point and Harry could see two men struggling on the sand. One of them stiffened and rolled off the other, who then jumped up and began to race after the shuttle, the crowd cheering him on.

  The seats moved aft again. It would be a three-way fight for the knife this time. The sound of the crowd diminished as all eyes focused on the struggle, now out of Harry’s sight. A collective sigh signified something, but he had no idea what.

  The seats moved aft and now Harry was at the rear, feet dangling in open air. Facing him from the tail of the shuttle was a small platform attached to the bottom of a ladder leading to the centerline of the fuselage. He looked to his right and saw a killer looking back at him. His opponent looked like a man who had opened more than a few throats in his time. Harry was surprised at his own lack of fear.

  At the sound of a heavy thump he turned back to the platform. A human stood there, grinning at him. Harry knew without a doubt who this was. “You’re Benedict.” He stated flatly.