Forge of War (Jack of Harts) (7 page)

A face appeared on one of the displays, a face every school child born in the last century knew very well.  It was the face of the Peloran who made Contact a hundred years ago.  He smiled.

“This is Admiral Aneerin of the Peloran Confederation,” he said as if he did not have a care in the world.  “Your attempt to destroy Fort Wichita was admirable but it has failed.  You are now out of time.  I am free of the ships you thought would pin me in place and reinforcements are coming.  You may destroy a few more ships if you stay, but you will
not
destroy the fort, while we
will
destroy every ship that remains to try, and then
I
will track down every ship that flees and kill
them
.  This is your
only
chance to decide your fate.  Flee now, and I will let you go.  Stay, and I
will
kill you
all
.”  A Shang heavy cruiser flashed red in the displays.  “All ships will fire on
that
target in five…four…three…two…” Aneerin continued, a hand raised and lowering a finger at each count.

A flash of light engulfed the ship and it disappeared into hyperspace.  More flashes of light heralded the retreat of other Shang ships, first one, then two and three at a time.  Ten seconds later, only the Shang cripples remained, floating around the field of battle.

The transmission faded away and Jack let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.  “My…God,” he whispered.  A display showed the Chinese squadron moving away from Hawaii and back towards their orbitals.

“Yeah,” Betty answered.

“He stopped it,” Jack whispered.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think he was bluffing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me neither.  I don’t think I want to play poker with him.”  Jack leaned back in his seat as the surviving Shang fighters retreated as well, moving towards deep space and a probable pickup by their mother ships.

“Me neither.”  Betty gasped and brought a hand up to get his attention.  “Orders coming in!”

Jack raised an eyebrow at her as another face appeared on the displays.  Charles.  Cowboy Three.  Woodchuck was the name they’d given him.  It wasn’t the most complimentary, but he’d worn it without complaint.

“Mom has taken heavy damage,” Charles said.  “Cowboy Country is a big hole in her side.  We can’t land right now, but the Peloran have invited us to refuel and repair on their flagship.”  He gave them all an aristocratic raise of the head.  “I have accepted.  Are there any who would disagree with me?”

Jack pursed his lips and glanced at Betty.  She nodded towards Charles’s image.  He was really just one of the new recruits, no seniority except for test scores and a rich family over the rest of them.  And now he was giving them the chance to accept or challenge him.  It wasn’t the smartest thing to do in a lot of ways, but it fit him.  Jack nodded at Betty.  “Not from this peanuts gallery, Chief,” he said with a wry smile.

The other Cowboys echoed his statement and Jack relaxed in his seat, smiling at Betty.  She gave him an approving look.  It seemed Woodchuck had a new call sign.

“Ok, men,” Charles said, sounding like the heir of a wealthy family, and the Chief of fighting men.  “Let’s go in tight, let’s put our best foot forward, and let’s make certain they don’t regret inviting us over to visit.”

“Oorah,” the Cowboys answered.

Wreckage floated in the distance, pieces of Fort Wichita making up most of it, along with the American ships defending the fort.  Several Shang ships drifted as well, dead in space, accompanied by three Peloran destroyers nearly blown in half during the short battle.  Every remaining ship sported massive wounds in their flanks or noses, or sometimes their rears, and at least some of the wreckage belonged to these ships.  The Peloran squadron was already sucking in some of the wreckage on tractor beams.  He’d read that they used scrap as spare materials for their repairs but had never seen the practice before.  He noted with interest that they were only sucking in Peloran and Shang scrap.

“Well, that’s something you don’t see every day,” Jack said in an impressed voice.

“Waste not, want not,” Betty answered.  “Old battlefields are great sources of already refined metals.  There are still some Albion and Ennead battlefields left that we…well…the Peloran visit when they need to perform work.”

“We?  The Peloran?” Jack asked, raising an eyebrow at her small hologram on the console.

Betty shrugged, her yellow sundress shifting with the motion.  “My family I guess.”  She sighed and chewed on her lower lip.  “I remember them all you know.  So sometimes I think…but then…”  She trailed off and shrugged again.  “But I’m not really Peloran am I?”

Jack relaxed back in his seat and smiled at her.  “So if you aren’t Peloran, what
are
you?”

Betty frowned, deep in thought for a much longer time than usual, an eternity of computer time if she was really thinking about just that.  Finally she shook her head.  “I don’t know.”  She gave Jack an appraising eye.  “We’ve all been thinking about that, you know.  We aren’t really part of a new family here.  There
is
a new Terran family here, but we are still part of our
own
families, but we aren’t really Peloran either.  It’s hard to explain.”

Jack chuckled.  “I think you explained real well.  You’ve grown up away from home and you don’t know if you would fit back there now.”

Betty’s form blinked and she cocked her head to the side.  “That could explain it.  So…what do you think?”

Jack shook his head.  “Don’t ask me.  I’m still trying to figure out where I belong now that…well…this,” he said with a wave of his hand towards a large chunk of Shang debris drifting by.

“Yes,” Betty whispered.  “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Maybe,” she whispered.  “But sometimes I wonder if the Shang would have come if we hadn’t.  We think about that too, you know.  Maybe it
is
our fault they killed your parents.  Maybe it’s
my
fault.”

“No!” Jack said sternly.  He frowned at Betty.  “
Not
your fault.”  He shook his head.  “
Never
your fault.”  He licked his lips.  He wanted to kill everyone at fault for that.  He was
not
going to consider anything that placed her in that list.

“Maybe not our
fault
then,” Betty whispered sadly.  “But still our
responsibility
to help.”

Jack frowned at her words, a new thought coming to mind.  “Wait.  Why the confusion?  You’ve started new families before.  Surely you have a procedure for that?”

Betty let out a long breath and began to look old, like she was carrying the weight of her family’s two thousand and more years of experience.  “We do.  Standard procedure is for one, two, or more cybers to agree to make a new family in a new area that adapts to the local culture.  Anybody copied off their code is part of the family and a…native.  We…after the Shang attacked we agreed to pool all of our resources.  It’s usually bad form to poach locals from the local family like this, but because of the threat, we all agreed to make an exception.

“All of the families are choosing new partners.  We’re all…native…but our families aren’t.  And now we’re trying to figure out what that exception means for us.  Are we a member of our own family, those who share our own code but don’t understand the values we’re developing?  Or do we leave our families and join the…native family…even though we don’t share much code with them?  We’ve never done anything like this, Jack.  We’re different, and we don’t know what that means.”

Jack pursed his lips and frowned as his mind connected some dots.  “Sounds to me like you are talking about skin color.”

Betty blinked, cocked her head to the side, and gave him a long look.  “Interesting premise.  Although I’m not certain it matches.”

Jack shrugged.  “Me neither, but it sounds similar.  You all are wondering if your family is those who have the same genetics or the same values.  There’s still some of my people who’d never consider calling someone of a different skin color family.  Not that I’ve ever met one in person, for which I’m awful happy let me tell you.”

Betty nodded, blinked a couple more times in thought, and cocked her head to the other side.  “I shall consider that point of view and pass it on.  I doubt many of my people will be pleased with considering it, but it
is
well made.”

Jack winced.  “No need to cause a ruckus if it will just get people mad.”

Betty smiled and shook her head.  “No, Jack.  We have been running in circles for some time.  We never considered analyzing your history of race relations as part of the question.  This will I believe stimulate the debate rather well.”

Jack pulled in a deep breath and shrugged.  “I don’t know.  My people tend to get a little hot and bothered when you start throwing around the racist label.  That and Nazi tend to get the same reactions.  Fisticuffs, not stimulating debate.”

Betty’s smile softened.  “My people don’t use fisticuffs, Jack.  But I get your meaning.  I will be careful with my suggestion.  Thank you for caring enough to bring such a…difficult…suggestion to me.”

Jack cleared his throat and placed his hand next to Betty.  “You’re my partner….” Jack trailed off, not certain how to put his feelings to words.  “If…something bad happens with your family…if the debate polarizes…it won’t happen here.”  He looked away from her hologram and cleared his throat again.

She put her hand on his and he smiled while intently studying a display showing them approaching the Peloran battleship, angling towards its aft section.  The massive weapons ring caught his attention first.  Wrapping around the Peloran warship, it carried the four gravitic cannons that could shatter any ship in existence, along with what seemed like hundreds of smaller point defense lasers.  During combat, they literally
glowed
with the energy flowing through them.  Now entire sections were gone, ripped away by the Shang.  His eyes turned to the main hull and he scanned the golden runes running from one end of her bright white hull to the other, except where battle damage broke them.  Near the bow, the name
Guardian Light
was written in Peloran runes.  Or so he’d been told.  He just didn’t know Peloran runes well enough to read it yet.

“Thank you, Jack,” Betty said, her voice happy again.

Jack cleared his thought.  “Just…ah…following American tradition.  You know…welcoming the misfits that other nations can’t handle…” he finished with another clearing of his throat and pulled his eyes from the display to look at her.

Betty smiled at him gratefully, looking like herself again.  Young.  “Yes, we know that tradition.  We have been thinking about that.”

Jack smiled.  “Good.”  He waved his hand forward, at the approaching battleship.  “Last chance to bail out.”

“I’m not the bailing out type,” Betty returned with a chuckle as they passed through the energy curtain and into the
Guardian Light’s
fighter bay.

“Good to hear,” Jack said and looked at the bay.  It was large, though not as large as the Constellation’s hangar bay.  The other difference was that it didn’t run the length of the ship.  The main entrance was on the rear of the ship, but a solid white bulkhead encased the bay on all other sides.

He flicked his eyes over to see the first two Avengers landing against one bulkhead, and nodded as Betty spun them around to land as well.  The other fighters of the squadron landed next to them and the canopy opened.  He looked over at Betty to see her wearing the service uniform of the United States Marine Corps again.

She gave him an innocent smile, like she’d been wearing it the whole time, and stood up.  She jumped out of the cockpit, growing to full human scale, and landed on the deck with a nimble grace.  Jack chuckled and unbuckled the restraints before lifting himself out of the cockpit.  He climbed down the ladder that snapped out of the fighter’s side and jumped the last meter to the floor.

He turned away as the ladder clicked back into place and looked around the bay, pulling in a deep breath.  The air felt…natural.  He cocked his head to the side and frowned, taking another sniff.  He could smell burnt wiring and armor of course, and all the other stuff you’d expect to smell after battle, or even on a daily basis, but there was something else suffusing it.

Jack scanned the bay and its pure white bulkheads, wondering what it was he sensed.  He stopped as he caught sight of a tree on the far end of the bay away from the entrance.  He blinked and looked closer.  It was indeed a tree.  Inside a ship.  He scanned the area and saw several bushes around it, making a small garden.  He sniffed again and it all connected.  The air smelled natural because it
was
natural.  He’d heard they used plants to treat the air on their ships, not just mechanical filters, but it hadn’t really clicked until that moment.

“Well Boss, that’s a strange place for a garden,” Jessie said with a cocky tint from his left side.

Jack shrugged.  “They’re Peloran,” he said as if that explained everything.

“Good point,” Jessie answered with a smile.

“Jack,” Betty said and Jack turned to look at her, standing next to him.  He followed the point of her arm and saw another figure approaching them.

He focused on the man and recognized him.  Hal, the
Guardian Light’s
controlling cyber.  Like most cybers, he looked like just another human on a stroll across the hangar bay in his white Peloran uniform.  As he approached, Jack realized he appeared Californian, lacking the telltale elfin facial lines that most Peloran had.  But like most Peloran, he had long hair down to his shoulders.  They used the long hair to cover their pointed ears so they could blend in with a crowd better.  Jack wondered what shape Hal’s ears were under that hair.

Hal walked up to the pilots and cybers and smiled.  “Welcome to the
Guardian Light
.”  He waved a hand and several men and women wearing the hallmark Peloran faces began approaching the line of fighters.  “We will take care of your ships.  Now if you will follow me, refreshment is arranged.”

Jack turned at the sound of a Peloran fighter squadron entering the bay and let out a long breath of amazement.  He’d never seen one of them this close, let alone nine of them at once.  They were rakishly thin, with smooth lines that bespoke thousands of years of refinements, and moved towards their landing zone with a grace that impressed him.

“Yes,” Hal said, his voice sounding pleased.  “I do enjoy watching fighters land.  By the way, I know it is tradition in your military that all of your ships are female and are given female nicknames.”  His smile grew amused and he spread out his arms to emphasis his proud male figure to those who turned to look at him.  “I am not.  You may call me Hal.”

Jack smiled and looked at Betty.  She rolled her eyes at his look.  Jack turned back to Hal with a mischievous smile.  “That’s great.  You can call her Betty.”

“Well, of course.  That
is
her…” Hal trailed off and narrowed his eyes.  “Ah.  The song.  Jester is an appropriate callsign I see.”

Jack just smiled back.  It took some truly esoteric knowledge to catch a cyber, even if for only a second.  He was pleased to have found just the right piece of old music to trip the man up.

“Please follow me,” Hal said with a shake of his head and walked towards the hatch.

Jack double-timed it up to Hal, catching the cyber just inside the hatch.  “So Hal, can I ask you a question?”

Hal turned his head just enough to give Jack a long, calculating stare.  “You already did,” he finally answered and stepped through the hatch into a long white corridor.

Jack chuckled and scratched his chin, following Hal through.  “Touché.  Fine, can I ask another one?”

Hal’s mouth gave an amused twitch and somehow Jack knew what he was going to say.  “Did I stop you?”

Jack sighed.  “Touché,” he repeated.  He could see that
this
cyber didn’t believe in waiting very long for payback.

Hal chuckled.  “You may ask, Jack,” he said as he led the Americans around a corner.

Jack shook his head before speaking, updating his mental map of the ship.  “Hal’s not a very Peloran name, is it?”

Hal gave him a long look.  “No it’s not.  It’s also not the first name I’ve gone by.  It is common for new Americans to change their names to sound normal to American ears.  I took advantage of that custom when I came here.”