Hell's Reach (Galactic Liberation Series Book 6) Read online

  Straker drummed his fingers on the table. “But we do need information—and we have skimmers. When will Zaxby be back from Crossroads?”

  “He’s due home within twelve hours,” Indy replied.

  “How soon could an Arattak or Korven force conceivably get here?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Okay... The fleet to go to Alert One immediately. The rest of the Breakers are now on Alert Two. Pass the word. Cancel all trade run departures for now. We have how many operational skimmers?”

  “Fourteen of sixteen are here. Zaxby has one, and one is on the quarterly run to Freenix.”

  “Right,” Straker said. “Four skimmers will take stealth positions well away from Utopia. We’ll rotate them in every few days if we have to. Four more will remain inside the ring, with crews on alert. The other six will be outfitted as scout ships and sent to recon the systems we trade with. Skimmers may not be much use against shield-equipped ships, but they’re very good at hiding and running—and getting home without being followed, I hope. Commodore Gray, send them out as soon as they’re ready, at your discretion.”

  “Understood. One to Humbar, I presume?”

  “No. I’ll take Redwolf to Humbar to investigate directly. She’s got all the best tech Murdock can cram into her—underspace, top-level SAI, shield, weapons—hell, she’s more of a corvette than a yacht anymore. Once I find our people, I’ll send word and we’ll mount a rescue.”

  Colonel Keller coughed for attention. “Sir, it might be more efficient to buy our people back, if it comes to that. You should take trade-currency aboard, and quantum-locked Conglomerate credit.”

  “Breakers don’t pay ransom. That’ll just get more of our people taken hostage.”

  “It won’t hurt to have options, sir. And you might have to pay for fuel, repairs, bribes—who knows?”

  Straker stared for a moment at Keller, who gazed back without flinching. Damn it if she wasn’t right, he thought. Policy was fine, but sometimes you had to bend the rules to get things done—and besides, they were his rules to bend.

  “Point taken. Zaxby will pilot and be my brainiac. Steiner, you’re muscle.”

  The big Sachsen nodded, smiling a frightening, toothy smile.

  “We’ll figure out the rest of the team over the next twelve hours. I want to transit as soon as we get Zaxby aboard. Indy, get advance warning to him ASAP.”

  “Certainly, General,” Indy said.

  “Anything else right now?” Straker let his eyes roam over the assemblage. No one flinched. “Dismissed. Get to work.”

  They filed out, but one noticeable woman in distractingly tight clothing remained.

  “Damn, bossman,” Jilani said, “you military types are no fun. I was hoping for some teeth-gritted snarling. Some heartfelt blame and finger-pointing. Fun, in other words.”

  “Like your town council meetings?” Straker asked, swinging his chair around to face her. “If you want fun and fireworks, Loco’s your man… or isn’t he?”

  “Off and on.” Jilani admitted. She scowled and ran her fingers through her long black hair, today highlighted with bright orange smartcolor streaks. That hair—and her open, feisty personality—she was hard to ignore.

  “You and Loco are too similar. Attraction, repulsion... attraction again. Like magnets.”

  “Like you and Carla? People are people. We aren’t little military machines the way you seem to believe, General.”

  Straker contemplated her for a moment. “Is that what you really think?”

  “Oh, not all the time… but you do have the tendency.”

  “I think you’re just envious.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Envious?”

  “That the townspeople don’t follow orders better. What’s it like being the mayor of Paradiso these days?”

  “This mayor is regretting taking the job,” she said. “I’m holding elections for mayor next month, myself recused.”

  “Really? But you’re the people’s choice, I’m sure.”

  She shrugged. “Playing the hero was fine for a while, but it gets fucking tiresome. Everyone wants you to wave a magic wand and solve all their problems with a word. I need to get out of their way and let them work it out, and I need to get back to being who I am—Captain Jilani, free trader, with the emphasis on free.”

  “Why do I get the feeling you’re trying to sell me something?”

  “Not yet, bossman.”

  “Yet you’re here, getting involved in Breaker business as Captain Jilani, not as mayor. Right?”

  “When we’re attacked, it’s all our business, I’d say.”

  Straker pursed his lips in suspicion. Jilani was basically honest, but she had a streak of secretiveness that had been beaten into her by a brutal adolescence. Sometimes, like now, it seemed like those two sides of her were at war with each other—and Straker didn’t quite know how to deal with that.

  But he knew who did. “Loco will be in charge here, so whatever you do, coordinate with him. Until those elections happen, you’re still the mayor.”

  “Got it. We’ll hold the fort. Later, bossman.” She swaggered off.

  “Later.” He couldn’t help following her hips with his eyes until she’d gone out of sight.

  He pursed his lips, still wondering about what schemes she might be cooking up, but then he shook his head and turned his thoughts back to the crisis at hand.

  At noon, Straker met Murdock in his lab. Sinden, and several others joined him to see what the Breakers’ mad scientist had to say about how the Hercules could have been ambushed.

  Murdock was tall and thin, residually handsome underneath his stained coverall. He wore a greasy blonde ponytail, and he looked pallid and unhealthy. He had the nervous air of a stim junkie as he explained his findings with jerks and twitches of his hands and fingers.

  “So, ah, I’ve taken a hard look at the black box feed—by the way we need to upgrade those things, need more data, a lot more data—and I don’t have much to go on, really, but I got a theory. See, when a ship transits sidespace, it theoretically generates a wavefront, but that wavefront collapses and cancels itself out within microseconds in an infinite recursion, so—”

  “Murdock!” Straker clapped his hands. “Cut to the bedrock. What do you think they can actually do?”

  “Well, this is all very theoretical, you understand. Lots of things are theoretically possible, like interstellar FTL comms, or instant matter transmission, but they’re still beyond our reach, maybe for millennia.”

  “Like spontaneous subquantum AI generation?” Sinden chimed in.

  “Yes, yes, the Mindspark Device. I still don’t know how to make another one, but I’m working on—”

  Straker snapped his fingers. “Focus, Frank. Sidespace tracker. What do you think they can do? Dumb it down for me. Best guess.”

  “Right, right, um, ah, well, best guess, yes… If I were able to build a sensitive enough detector with a powerful SAI processor, with a little luck it could detect an incoming transit, and where it will emerge.”

  “Could it tell how many ships were coming, or how large?”

  “Not exactly. It could tell how many separate sidespace fields, and how powerful.”

  “Could they backtrack the signatures to their departure point?”

  “Theoretically yes, but in reality: no. So yes, maybe… but no, no. No.”

  Straker glared. He was beginning to get frustrated. People got hurt when he lost his temper, so he spoke his next words carefully. “Which is it? Pick one, Frank.”

  “Okay, I’ll say no, for now. Ask me again in ten years.”

  Straker sighed. “So how do we defeat it?”

  “With tech? I don’t know yet.” Murdock clenched and opened his hands in the air as if grabbing at flies. “I need to get my hands on their devices, so if you get a chance—”

  Straker gave him a thumbs-up. “We’ll grab one if we can. Otherwise, how do we keep from getting jumped every time we emerge?” />
  Sinden cleared her throat. “I can think of one easy solution. Shut down the generators early—drop out of sidespace in a different place than they expect. They’d have no way to predict that.”

  “Problem is, you couldn’t predict your arrival point either,” Murdock said. “Sidespace isn’t like normal space, where you approach your target at a measured pace, no, no. Shut down early, and you could come out almost anywhere in the universe. Anywhere!”

  “Oh, come on,” Straker said. “There has to be some tolerance in the sidespace engines, some wiggle room. So, we program the computers to shut down a tiny bit early, which will throw the ship to some random spot nearby, not too far.”

  “No, no, no!” Murdock pounded a workbench, making components jump and knocking a spanner onto the floor with a clatter. “The way sidespace works is, you either arrive totally inside your basket, or totally outside it. If you’re outside it, you could arrive anywhere. When ships disappear in sidespace, they’re gone. The one single recorded instance of anyone making it back to human space was the UES Augsburg in the year 2565. They lost both generators in a freak malfunction. They ended up sixty thousand light years away. It took them seventeen years to get home.”

  “I read about that,” Straker said. “So a ship in sidespace can change her target during transit—with some strain on the generators—but you can’t simply shut them down.”

  “Right, right. Think of sidespace like a multidimensional matrix where each discrete locational basket corresponds to normal space, but randomly. Shift over one basket, and that location might be almost anywhere.”

  “Wait, wait... ” Sinden said. “Look, sidespace target coordinates are usually locked, but that’s procedural, not technical. You don’t want a stray keystroke or bump of the controls to send you off course. But there’s nothing that keeps a ship from changing course within sidespace. Choosing a new target location—a basket, as you called it.”

  “Except the strain on the generators—which would be considerable, maybe catastrophic,” Murdock replied. “If you lose all your generators, you’re screwed. That’s a big roll of the dice.”

  The others gave Straker room as he began to pace. “There have to be some other tactics to mitigate this problem until we come up with a tech solution.”

  “I can think of some.” Sinden ticked things off on her fingers. “Send out a large nuke to go off at our emergence point to shock or destroy whatever’s waiting, and come in behind it. Or a missile pack if you want more discrimination. Or send a bunch of decoy drones ahead, set to arrive in the same system at random points. For underspace-equipped ships, you could dive immediately and run.”

  “There has to be some detection limit,” Straker said. “Why not transit in far, far outside curved space? Way outside the target system, in outer flatspace.”

  Murdock leaned over to tap at a keyscreen. “Hmm, maybe, but if they did detect you, they could jump to the same spot. You’d probably get there first, which would help, but they might still hit you with a bigger fleet.”

  Straker checked his chrono. “Looks to me like this opens up a whole new set of tactical problems. You brainiacs have four hours to discuss it, because we’re leaving on time, hell or high water.”

  Three hours later, Straker walked his Ripper battlesuit into the Redwolf’s crowded hold, clamping it down next to Steiner’s.

  “I didn’t know you were going to war,” a familiar voice from behind him said.

  “Mara!” Straker turned to scoop up his sister in a hug.

  She looked at him strangely, and he let her go.

  “You’re freaking out about Carla, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Of course I am,” he admitted.

  Mara nodded. “Holding back your emotions. Putting on a good show for the troops—but you don’t fool me.”

  “That’s because you’re a brainiac.”

  She made a face. “It’s in spite of the fact I’m a brainiac. We’re known for intellect, not empathy.”

  He nodded, and he forced a smile. “I’ve hardly seen you out of your labs lately, you and Murdock. If you’d been there at noon, I would’ve thought you two had a thing going.”

  Mara made a face. “Blech. His rejuvenation tank might have fixed his body, but it didn’t fix his habits. I have to order him to go shower and brush his teeth once a day, and half the time he sleeps on a cot in the lab.”

  “Order him?”

  “Like most total geeks, he’ll do anything a pretty girl tells him to... if you can get him to pay attention.”

  “So he does need a girlfriend.”

  “Maybe, but it’ll never be me.”

  “Why not?”

  She avoided his eye and picked up some gear. “Let’s get this stuff aboard.”

  Straker eyed her with sudden suspicion. Mara had two traveling cases with her, which she’d stacked in a pile of gear on the tarmac.

  “What this?” he demanded. “You think you’re coming aboard? No.”

  “Yes. Yes, I’m going with you. Come on, Carla is my sister-in-law. She’s made me into an auntie twice over.”

  Straker stepped into her way, spreading his arms. “This wasn’t the plan.”

  “Not your plan,” she said.

  “I’m in charge, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “Okay, you’re in charge. Now get out of my way, Derek, before I kick you in the patella.”

  Straker instinctively covered his crotch, remembering a five-year-old who knew exactly where to hurt her big brother.

  “No, the patella,” she said, pointing lower. “The kneecap.”

  He grinned in spite of himself. “That’s all you could ever reach, squirt. Besides, there’s no space aboard... unless you want to room with Zaxby.”

  “Ew. I’ll bunk with Steiner.”

  “Koroba’s bunking with Steiner.”

  “I already told Koroba to stand down. I’m taking her place.”

  Straker sighed. “Why? We already have Zaxby for the brainiac stuff. Koroba’s a trained operative with covert experience, and obviously a woman. I might need her.”

  “I’m ‘obviously’ a woman too. You already have two trained operatives—yourself and Steiner—and Zaxby’s a War Male. You need more brains on this trip, not more brawn. For machines, Zaxby’s fine—but I’m no slouch myself. For biotech, I’m the best you have, and I’ve spent the past year studying the aliens out here in the Middle Reach.”

  Straker checked his chrono and growled in his throat. “Fine, fine. Let’s get you aboard. We’re supposed to meet Zaxby in half an hour, and then transit straight out.”

  Steiner took the news of his new roommate with a laconic shrug. “All equal to me,” he said in his stilted Earthan.

  “Nobody’s equal to you,” Mara said, kissing him on the cheek. “Now stow my gear, will you, Jurgen?”

  Straker saw Steiner actually blush. Pretty girls had forever made mighty men pause, he thought, from Helen of Troy onward. “Help Mara get settled, will you, Jurgen?” He smirked.

  Steiner turned an even deeper red. “Jawohl, Herr General.”

  Half an hour later, the Redwolf waited for Zaxby within the tiny bubble of curved space generated by the mass of the cylinder and its mini-star.

  Once the octopoid arrived nearby and shuttled over, Zaxby set course for Humbar.

  Chapter 2

  Loco, on maneuvers in the wilds of the Utopia Dyson-cylinder.

  “Come in, Mikey,” Chiara Jilani’s voice called over Loco’s comlink as he sighted down the barrel of his slugthrower. Today, he was drilling the support troops on basic low-tech infantry tactics. You never knew when electronics would fail and old-fashioned chemical-powered bullets would be all you had.

  “Stand by. And quit calling me Mikey.” He fired a burst at the armored target-robot that bobbed and weaved among the trees, scoring a hit. Around him, soldiers in fatigues did the same. He let them shoot for a few more seconds before interrupting. “Cease fire! Take ten. Squad le
aders, give feedback.”

  After they reported in, he noticed one more blinking call. “What is it, Mayor Jilani?”

  “Oh, are we speaking formally now, General Paloco?”

  “I dunno. First you like me, then you don’t, then you like me again, then you don’t—wash, rinse, repeat, and put me through the wringer every time. It’s draining.”

  “Well, if you want to be drained again, big guy, come back to base. I have a proposition for you.”

  Loco wavered. Never in his life had he been in this position—liking a woman so much he was helpless in the face of her emotional whiplashing. He ought to tell her to piss off. He should walk away and never look back—but he couldn’t seem to do it. It’d been a year since they met, and mere infatuation had never lasted this long, never been this intense.

  Was it love? He had no idea. He’d never been in love before, never been all moony-eyed over someone like Derek over Carla. Women were amusement park rides to be ridden and then forgotten about until next time. Sure, Campos was the mother of his child, and they were friends, a kind of quiet, comfortable, companionable thing—but he’d never been in love with Campos.

  It wasn’t like that with Chiara.

  All of these thoughts raced through his mind within the space of a long second, and he found himself sighing and answering her. “On my way. Loco out.” He turned over the field exercise to the battalion commander and hopped into his aircar.

  Once he was cruising above the green-world landscape of Utopia, he wondered again where the world-builders had gone. The artificial planet’s ancient forests and deep, wandering rivers were unmarked by any trace of the works of humans or aliens. Unless you noticed the faint upward curve of the anti-horizon, you’d never know you weren’t on a natural planet. Obviously, there were aliens out there far older and more powerful than humans or the aliens they’d met so far. Creatures that could build a world like this, with its own mini-star with a moon in its orbit inside the cylinder. Where did they go? Why would they abandon it?

  He decided these were bigger questions for bigger minds than his.