The Gray Matter (Rebels and Patriots Book 3) Page 4

  He sat and took a closer look at the strange, velvety ornaments someone had hung in the tree. He squinted. The yellow/orange, slightly irregular orbs seemed to somehow be grafted right onto the tree. He shrugged, taking another look around the square before trying the coffee. His eyebrows shot up in delight.

  He’d been leery of the beverage, knowing the shopkeeper had made it right in front of his eyes, but it actually tasted… better… than proper coffee from a heat-serve bag. Those little brown beans he’d been crushing really seemed to add complexity to the coffee. He took another sip and leaned back in his chair with a sigh.

  It was a pleasant relief to drop the drunken oaf act.

  A low rumble from the far side of the square caught his attention. He looked over to see the awning of a produce shop lifting up from the shipping level. He’d gotten the basics on how Masra’s markets worked while the shopkeeper was making the coffee.

  The Market was dotted with forty square holes, each surrounded by a protective railing. At night, when the shops closed, they lowered down to the more secure level. In the morning, when the sale goods were brought in by ground trucks, the shops were already at the level set aside for mechanized transport.

  As each shop was stocked, it would return to the market level and, as Daffyd watched, the market quickly came to life. As he’d hoped, a large part of the early clientele made the coffee shop their first waypoint.

  The seats around him filled quickly and he’d deliberately put himself within hearing range of several circular conversation pits. The conversations ran the usual gambit, work, family and war. There was a lot of discussion about the long-running conflict between the colonies, though Daffyd had come down to the surface thinking they’d found the only Human world in this region.

  Hearing there were more worlds – enough to keep a low-level war going for decades – came as a bit of a surprise. Less surprising was the number of times the names Urbica and Grimm popped up. He nodded to himself. The general knew her business. If there was a war out here, she wouldn’t be sitting on the sidelines.

  He grinned. Evidently, she was rumored to have seized a Gray cruiser within hours of being freed from their clutches. He figured that might not even be an exaggeration. He’d been with her when they seized the Sucker Punch. They’d actually seized a cruiser first but, when the Gray crew activated the self-destruct, they abandoned the ship in favor of the brand new attack carrier that the cruiser was supposed to be protecting.

  A man to his right, so close he was practically in Daffyd’s back pocket, was loudly denying the admittedly tall tale and Daffyd saw a chance to join in the discussion and, perhaps, steer it in a more productive direction.

  “At Irricana,” he said, turning to face the men seated in the round pit, “she and her dragoons took a Gray cruiser by boarding but then abandoned it for a chance to seize a carrier instead.” He tilted his head at the man who didn’t believe in her more recent exploits, as if to say ‘you can’t argue with the facts’. “Total time between leaving the Rope a Dope and securing the Sucker Punch was less than two centidays.”

  “You’re basing that on Imperial records, friend,” a man on the other side of the pit pointed out reasonably. “I wouldn’t put too much faith in Mankind’s longest running serial fiction, if I were you.”

  Daffyd joined in the laughter good naturedly, taking it as a chance to pick up his drink and join them. “You don’t need to rely on Imperial records, friend,” he told the man. “Just ask the eyewitnesses. It happened in Irricanan orbit, in full view of the station, hundreds of ships and a full shift on duty at Orbital Control.”

  He leaned forward. “Or you could just ask someone who was there with her.”

  The skeptic on his right snorted in derision. “And I suppose we’re supposed to believe that means you?”

  “What’s so unbelievable about that?” Daffyd shrugged. “Our general went missing and we decided to come looking for her.”

  The man across the pit grinned. “I’d heard a slightly more… nuanced… story than that.”

  Daffyd nodded. He and his fellow dragoons were trying to find General Urbica and it looked like she wasn’t currently in a mood to be found. Their best bet was to make a public spectacle of themselves. The General would hear of them and come looking.

  So there was no sense in holding anything back.

  “By ‘nuanced’ I assume you’re referring to my incarceration and the fact that the 1st Gliessan Dragoons were ordered by CentCom to lay down arms and return to civilian pursuits?”

  The man nodded.

  “All the more reason, don’t you think,” Daffyd asked, “for us to come find our stranded commander?” He stuck out his arm. “No need to stand on faith. Just scan my implant.”

  The skeptic beat the others to the punch, pulling out his data-unit and waving it over Daffyd’s arm. The holographic readout appeared over the scanner and the man grunted in surprise. “Imperial chip,” he muttered. “Says he’s Daffyd ap Rhys.”

  “You invented the source-directed wormhole generator?” the other man asked.

  “Wǒ de mā,” Daffyd exclaimed. “And you were just talking about serial fiction! That was a cover story to keep CentCom from having it scrapped. The Grays invented that drive and, hopefully, died when we used it to raid the world they were working on. If we didn’t…”

  A hand fell on his shoulder, the grip firm.

  The men at the table were looking past him, their eyes growing wide.

  Luck is a Harsh Mistress

  “We’re at the rendezvous coordinates,” Robin announced from the helm. “Captain Fall’s combat group is already here.” Despite the good news, she frowned at her display as though it had just insulted her sister.

  Julia nodded, relieved that Fall had returned to the Odin’s Eye nebula from another ambush without straying from the program and getting anyone killed. “Very well,” she replied. We’ll…”

  “Contact!” the tactical officer broke in. “We have distortion alerts consistent with multiple enemy inbounds.”

  “Beat to quarters,” Hale ordered in a calm but loud voice. “Weapons free.”

  Julia knew there was no need to pass that order to the rest of Hale’s small combat group. They were well drilled and they’d be maneuvering to get the best shots on the inbound vessels without any prompting from her.

  “Reading fifteen cruisers, twenty frigates and one carrier,” the tactical officer announced.

  Julia walked into the midst of the tactical holo projected in the center of the bridge. Did that carrier have the same kind of wormhole generator they’d found on the Sucker Punch? Regardless, it was a juicy target.

  Since the Battle of Greenland Roads, carriers had been viewed as the successor to the super-dreadnought. No longer were naval engagements a matter of putting out as much ordnance as possible and hoping for hits as forces closed on one another. Naval doctrine among most of the advanced species now called for carrier-launched ship destroyers that could get in close and deal damage more effectively.

  An enemy carrier was automatically a primary target in any engagement but Julia had only nine ships at her disposal.

  She caught Hale’s questioning look. “Standing orders, Captain Hale. If anyone happens to get off a shot at that carrier in passing, I won’t complain, but we’re to break contact and escape with all due haste.”

  Robin turned to look back at Julia. “Why aren’t the Grays firing? They’ve definitely got the drop on us.”

  “Why indeed,” Julia muttered. “Were they hoping to capture prisoners?” It would mark a drastic departure from Gray doctrine, if they were. They weren’t in the business of capturing their own kind.

  “Chto za Huy?” Hale exclaimed. “Fall’s taking his squadron straight at the carrier.” He seemed to catch himself on the verge of uttering a scathing criticism in front of his own bridge crew. “Ballsy, but not a course of action afflicted with an abundance of good sense.”

  “Something isn’
t right,” the tactical officer warned. “Some of those Gray cruisers are sitting where gravimetric ribbons should be. Why in Hades aren’t they falling in?”

  “Jiàn tā de guǐ!” Julia grabbed Hale by the shoulder. “They set off some nukes in here and re-aligned the ribbons. Our current cartography will get us killed!”

  “Must have been recent,” Hale replied. “The gases still haven’t re-aligned, which is why we didn’t notice.”

  “No wonder they aren’t firing.” Julia looked at the holographic enemy. “They don’t want the trajectory of their rounds to curve in the wrong place and alert our tactical computer to the discrepancy.”

  “And we can use that,” Hale enthused, “now that we know about it.” He looked to Robin. “The distortion drive is spooled up?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  He turned to the left. “Tactical, get every gun firing and task the computer to map the new ribbon locations. Helm will jump the ship as soon as we resolve a clear path out.”

  There was no need to risk sending an explanation in Human language. The targeting computers on the other ships would pick up on the discrepancy in the outbound trajectories and alert the crews. Any confusion would be cleared up in short order.

  As Julia watched, a haze of lines began tracing their way out from the Ava Klum’s projected image. Some ran true enough, to the naked eye, but tiny calculations began showing next to each trajectory. Some of the rounds even disappeared entirely, confirming the system’s predictions.

  “Tāmāde!” Hale muttered. “Fall’s got a cruiser and a frigate stuck.” Sure enough, the two ships were caught in the gravity well of an unmapped ribbon. “Get out of there,” he urged quietly. “Don’t reinforce failure.”

  The three remaining ships of Fall’s combat group continued to press the attack, seemingly oblivious to their comrades’ plight.

  “They’re losing ground,” Julia almost whispered. The two ships, carrying more than two thousand of her crewmen, were sliding back into the ribbon. External equipment and hull plating began tearing loose, tumbling into oblivion as the bigger cruiser drifted back against her engine’s best efforts.

  As she watched in horror, the engines themselves broke loose and fell into the abyss. The ship herself, with nothing to slow her fate, was snatched out of existence in the blink of an eye.

  The frigate captain must have decided to throw the dice because he engaged his distortion drive and, for a brief instant, it looked as though they might escape. The vessel took on an elongated look, as her engines began to create the compression differential that would move the universe past her, but then she broke in two. With her engines snatched into the void, the front half dropped back out of distortion at a standstill, only to be pulled into the quick, brutal embrace of the ribbon.

  “Captain Hale,” she began, barely keeping her voice under control, “send the withdrawal signal again, if you please.” Grief and rage fought for control, but she forced them both aside. She still had eight ships and their crews to save. She could deal with the rest later.

  If there was a later.

  “We have a path,” the navigation officer announced urgently. “Our other call-signs are lining up for the jump.”

  Under standing orders for situations just like this one, each ship would jump at the earliest opportunity. There was no need to send signals that might blow their cover, revealing who the Grays were really up against. Julia looked at the tactical holo.

  Fall’s remaining three ships seemed to have stopped their forward motion and were angling away from the enemy carrier.

  The holo flickered, stabilized and then dissolved into a green haze of static.

  “We’re out,” Robin reported. “ETA to secondary rendezvous is eight centi-days.”

  Julia looked over at Hale. “We can only hope he manages to jump his ships out of there,” she said, keeping her voice low because she knew she couldn’t trust it right now at a higher volume.

  Hale raised an eyebrow. “Or that they fly into a ribbon.” He shrugged. “If the Grays find any Human corpses floating around in the wreckage, we’re in for a bit of trouble.”

  She looked around at the subdued bridge crew. She resisted the urge to shake her head. The longer you ride a lucky streak, the more certain it becomes that you’ll run into trouble.

  And one way or another, trouble would be following them home.

  You’re not on Kansas Anymore

  Pulver gave Daffyd’s shoulder what he hoped to be a particularly painful squeeze. “Get up!”

  Daffyd finished his drink, nodded to the men he’d been talking to and came to his feet with a slight waver. He turned slowly, giving Pulver a mildly surprised look. “Commander Pulver,” he chided, “it’s unseemly for a man of your station to follow me around like this. If you wanted my autograph, all you had to do is…”

  “As an officer holding his Imperial Majesty’s commission,” Pulver cut in impatiently, “I hereby place you under arrest.”

  “Ah…” ap Rhys nodded sympathetically “… this would be about that business at Nidaveller Station.” He smiled. “Who could blame you and this fine gentleman here…” he pointed over Pulver’s left shoulder, “for thinking I had something to do with it?”

  Frowning, Pulver glanced over his shoulder and cursed his own stupidity as he heard ap Rhys’ mug shatter on the flagstones amid the scuffle of rapidly accelerating feet. He swung his head back around to see the prisoner racing across the seating area, knocking over tables and patrons in his haste.

  Rolling his eyes, Pulver pulled out the stun launcher he’d taken from the armory on the Sucker Punch before coming down to Masra. He aimed it at the fleeing back and pulled the trigger, sending a cloud of tiny spheres after the quarry.

  Several struck innocent bystanders, but they were usually non-lethal. No officer in the Imperium would worry about shocking a few civilians as long as they got their target.

  The spheres hit with more than enough force to compress the intervening layers of clothing and plant their tiny barbs into skin. Once embedded, their micro-capacitors released their electrical charges, overloading the victim’s nervous system.

  With a strange squawk, ap Rhys went down twitching. Several others were on the ground as well, but Pulver kept his eyes on the target. “Grab him!” he shouted.

  Several of his men jumped to their feet, throwing off the local robes they’d been wearing to blend in. They raced over to the twitching prisoner and rolled him onto his belly to place polymer joint locks at his wrists and ankles.

  Pulver became aware of a growing current of anger in the crowd. Surprise at seeing Imperial uniforms was quickly giving way to anger. He suddenly realized that, though he’d behaved in a perfectly ordinary way for a commissioned officer in the Imperium, Masra was definitely not part of the Imperium.

  He’d already noticed that few of the locals went without weapons. He’d noticed, but it hadn’t really meant much to him until now, when he’d cavalierly stunned six or seven of their people in order to get his prisoner.

  “You have no business here,” shouted one of the men who’d been talking to ap Rhys, “and no rights, either.”

  “And nobody to claim your blood-price,” another man in the small seating pit added as he stood, his right hand straying to the butt of a pistol.

  Pulver was no combat officer, but it didn’t take a tactical genius to see there was little to be gained from trying to win an argument with hundreds of angry, armed individuals. He gave them a bow, bending at the waist but keeping his eyes on the locals. “My apologies,” he offered. “I have overstepped in my zeal. We will leave you in peace.”

  Maxwell was quick enough to realize that was the cue to get the prisoner moving. He detailed three men to the task, one to each arm, and one to the feet.

  Pulver gave the men in the pit a polite nod before following his men. Shouts followed them, mostly referring to his ancestry or to the lack of enthusiasm for the Imperium in general. “Hands off your weapons
,” he hissed. “If one of us pulls a gun, we’re all dead.”

  He’d spent most of his engineering career with the constant threat of liquidation hanging over his head but he’d never felt the adrenaline-fueled rush of imminent danger before. He fought to keep his thoughts in order. He knew any wrong move would get them killed. Even making all the right moves might end in the same result.

  Paradoxically, time seemed to dilate for him, much like the distortion bubble of a ship’s drive. Though their progress through the endless alleyways of Masra seemed painfully slow, he still seemed to perceive everything at an accelerated pace.

  Was this what it was like for combat personnel? He saw one local fling a rock at Maxwell and Pulver reached out to put a steadying hand on his energy specialist cum sensor officer as the missile struck.

  “We’re leaving,” he soothed the local. “No need for trouble.” He reckoned it wouldn’t hurt to remind the man that the men in Pulver’s party were armed and capable of making trouble. He also knew it was a bluff.

  Shouts echoed off the alley walls as they made their way to the shuttle pad. Running feet echoed from every side alley and he hoped they were running away, but he had a sinking feeling that they weren’t. They passed through a larger intersection, walking under a wind tower, the relatively cool jet of air reminding him how sweaty he was.

  He could smell the stink of fear on his own sweat as their way forward became more and more congested. The Masrans were starting to push at Pulver’s men, loudly declaring that they would never allow their world to be annexed and expressing anger at his use of the stun gun.

  In the Imperium, this kind of reaction was simply unthinkable. Clearly, the citizens of this world were accustomed to a great deal more in the way of personal liberties and Pulver was starting to think his transgression would spell his death.

  Then he saw the shuttle.

  A Marine lance corporal must have noticed the approach of Pulver’s party. He led six fellow Marines down the boarding ramp in full HMA. Two of the armored Marines stayed at the ramp to guard the craft while the other four followed the lance corporal, parting the tide of Humanity.