Hidden Empire (64 page)
J
ess’s heart still ached with cold anger, but now that he had decided what action to take, the freedom gave him a giddy sense
of relief. He had never seen the Guiding Star so clearly in his life; he knew exactly what course he must set.
Jess did not intend to inform the Roamer council of what he was doing—not Speaker Jhy Okiah, not even Cesca Peroni. He had
seen the squabbling and panic and indecision in the recent clan gathering at Rendezvous. They would only muddy the water.
No, this would be his personal retaliation, for good or ill. His uncles on Plumas had approved—raspy Caleb Tamblyn had even
insisted on coming along—but Jess made it clear that he must be in charge. It was his clan’s business, his responsibility
… his revenge. And afterward, there would be no one but himself to blame.
Accompanied by a group of picked loyal workers from the Plumas water-extraction facilities, Jess took several industrial ships
loaded with all the resources and equipment he would need. These volunteers had known Ross, had worked for Bram Tamblyn, and
would follow Jess’s every instruction. Once his uncle Caleb had learned what he meant to do and told the work crews, no force
in the universe could have prevented them from helping him.
Now, the mismatched vessels rendezvoused at the edge of the Golgen system, out in the icy veil of the Kuiper belt of comets
high above the ecliptic. From there, they could look down on the bright spotlight of the gas giant.
Murderous aliens lurked somewhere deep within those lemony-tan clouds.
Jess thought he could sense his brother down there, along with the ghosts of all those who had been slaughtered aboard the
Blue Sky Mine. Had the skymine offended the aliens somehow? Or did the enemy simply see Roamers as insignificant insects to
be squashed and then brushed aside?
So far, the Roamers knew of five skymines that had been obliterated, with all hands lost, on scattered and unrelated gas giants.
The attacks were unprovoked and merciless … and thus far unpunished.
Many uneasy Roamer clans had already pulled their independent skymines from other gas giants, driving them up out of the atmospheres
and mothballing them in planetary orbit. Ekti production had dropped to a fraction of what it had been before the attack on
Blue Sky Mine. The Terran Hanseatic League had not yet felt the squeeze, but Jess was certain that Chairman Wenceslas and
King Frederick already understood the impending shortages of starship fuel. This crisis had to be resolved soon.
He opened the communications channel in his small ship. All of his volunteer workers listened in from their own vessels. “My
brother died down there on Golgen. So did members of many of your clans. By the Guiding Star, now it’s up to us to do something
about it.”
He drew a breath. Jess had not rehearsed his speech. “Roamers are not a violent people. We don’t have an impressive military
force or weapons of mass destruction. But we are not to be trifled with. We will resist these enemies and avenge our lost
family members. Not one of us can shrink from this task. I certainly don’t intend to.”
Growling oaths and muttered cheers came over the communications link, fierce determination that smothered an undercurrent
of fear.
“Lucky for us the universe provides its own weapons,” Jess said. “We’re going to use them.”
The system was surrounded by an arsenal of cometary shards, giant balls of ice that he would convert into bombs. Back on Plumas,
he had already analyzed precise mappings of the Kuiper belt, projecting millions of cometary orbits and simulating the results
of perturbations. He found more than a thousand candidates, any one of which would rain incredible destruction onto Golgen.
Jess had an intuitive feel for celestial mechanics and orbital maneuvers. He had always been particularly good at navigation
and Roamer “stargames,” looking at constellations from different perspectives and backtracking to place the viewer on an objective
map of the Spiral Arm. When he was younger, he’d liked to look at the maps, often with Tasia, and imagine different places
where he’d never gone, exotic worlds or galactic phenomena that could not be fully appreciated through small images on a screen.
Today, Jess gritted his teeth and stared at Golgen’s celestial cartography for a different purpose entirely. The ponderous
and inexorable paths determined by celestial mechanics often took centuries, and he eliminated most of the alternatives, selecting
only those comets that could be dropped in steep hyperbolic orbits, massive cannonballs carrying enough kinetic energy for
an impact equivalent to a thousand atomic warheads. Eighteen outer comets were viable projectiles.
His Plumas commando crews—everyday water miners, pump specialists, and ice engineers—carried automated reaction thrusters
that would dig out and hurl chunks of cometary mass in the opposite direction. When the constant recoil persisted for weeks
and weeks, it would gradually perturb the comet out of orbit and send it down on a collision course.
“You all know your targets. Let’s start rolling these big ice bombs down to smack Golgen right in the face.” Jess lowered
his voice to a growl. “Those aliens don’t realize just how much trouble they’ve asked for.”
With a final round of acknowledgments, the Roamer ships split away from Jess and dispersed into the obstacle course of tumbling
icebergs. These workers understood the minimal tolerances and the accuracies that were involved; after all, they had worked
for demanding Bram Tamblyn. Any Roamer who cut corners or performed sloppy work ended up dead soon enough, usually with the
blood of many innocents on his careless hands.
Jess double-checked his cargo and altered course toward his chosen target, a large comet already inbound to the inner system.
He dropped out of the edge of the Kuiper belt into the neighborhood of the ecliptic.
Inside the cockpit, Jess wore insulated work clothes, a comfortable set of overalls with dozens of pockets, clips, and gadget
belts. Over the outfit he had wrapped an embroidered shoulder cloak, an old family treasure his mother had made before her
death in the Plumas crevasse. On it were stylized designs and the names of Ross, Jess, and Tasia against a background of the
Roamer Chain. His heart sank as he thought of how his tight clan had unraveled, how his whole family had dwindled. But things
would change.
The separate crews arrived at their snowball landing points, locked down docking clamps, and emerged from their ships to begin
installing equipment. Throughout the day, the Plumas team transmitted messages, updating Jess. With deceptively gentle movements,
his other team members had launched a flurry of comets like a shotgun blast toward the gas giant. Now, the only thing needed
was time and celestial mechanics. The bombardment would continue for years, one impact after another.
“That’ll give ’em heartburn,” said his uncle Caleb over the comm.
But Jess had in mind a more immediate strike, a blow that he could observe soon, while his anger still burned high. For Ross.
He brought his ship close to the comet dropping toward the sun on its original long-term journey. The ice mountain had passed
close enough to be deviated by Golgen’s gravity, hooking its orbit inward. Sunlight had volatilized a thin mist from its surface
that leaked out in a fuzzy mane that would eventually become a tail.
Jess mapped the surface topography of the comet to understand the material structure. After using scanners to investigate
the internal inhomogeneities, he modified his calculations. If everything worked out right, this comet would arrive at its
target within a month. Selecting the appropriate place, Jess anchored his ship on an ice clearing where shards of vacuum-extruded
pinnacles crunched under the weight of his hull. His fuel tanks and his cargo hold were filled with ekti, enough to provide
a prolonged thrust with immense force. The roar echoed into the silent vacuum, and Jess grimly held on as the ship trembled
with the effort. A Roamer vessel locked down, with its stardrive engines blasting at full thrust for two weeks, would be enough
to drive the comet like a sledgehammer into the target planet.
Within a day, one of the Plumas crew ships would pick him up. The engines continued to blast away, nudging the giant ice mountain.
Jess had plenty of time to think. He had no regrets, no reservations. He could not turn back. This was something he had to
do.
He didn’t care what the Big Goose or the Eddies might think. No doubt, even some Roamers might be infuriated at his provocative
act, but most would cheer that he had actually done something. He didn’t know if Cesca would be disappointed in him, or if
she would applaud his actions. He would stand firm, either way, knowing his obligations. It wasn’t as if diplomacy had been
effective. The enemy had offered no communication whatsoever.
He looked through his cockpit window and saw the giant planet below him, much closer now, a bright spotlight like a bull’s-eye.
Before he suited up to go wait for the pickup ship, Jess removed the embroidered shoulder covering that bore his name along
with Ross’s and Tasia’s. He laid it gently in the captain’s chair, then went to the suit locker and made ready to depart.
He did not once look back or reconsider what he was doing.
With his own ship anchored to the comet and its heavy stardrive engines blazing, adding inexorable force in a vector against
the routine pull of gravity, Jess climbed aboard Caleb’s pickup vessel that had arrived for him. They joined the other Roamer
ships on their way out of the system.
Jess scanned the eighteen mountains of ice that had already begun their descent. Once he made certain that each one of the
comet bombs was on course, he sank back into his padded chair and gave orders for his team to depart.
The die was cast.
S
ome job this had turned out to be. Branson Roberts hated piloting the only human ship in an isolated godforsaken system, especially
in a place where the destructive aliens were bound to be hiding. But he had his orders. Even worse, he had no choice. General
Lanyan had made sure of that.
At least the EDF had given Roberts back his own ship, the
Blind Faith
, and it was good to be sitting at the old girl’s controls again. The cockpit felt like home, felt like normal—except for
all the modified systems, pumped-up engines, and heavy armor the EDF had installed on the ship. That had seemed like adding
insult to injury.
Still, when he dropped into the Dasra system hunting alien bogeymen, Roberts was glad that no one but himself held the controls.
He and the
Blind Faith
had been through a lot together.
A month ago, the deep-core aliens had emerged from the cloud decks of Dasra and destroyed Roamer ekti-harvesting facilities
there, the aliens’ fifth such target. The Dasra attack played out the same as all the others: Huge crystalline globes attacked
with no warning, no mercy, accepting no surrender. The aliens had annihilated the skymine despite transmitted pleas, leaving
no wreckage or survivors.
Thus, the deep-core aliens had proved they lived within this system, and Branson Roberts had orders to find them. How many
other gas giants did the enemy inhabit? Were all of them danger zones?
He thought of Rlinda Kett, with her generous body and expansive moods. She always called him her favorite ex-husband, and
he called her his favorite ex-wife, though he had only been married once. Roberts had proven to be a mediocre husband but
an excellent pilot, so Rlinda kept him on with her small merchant fleet. He’d made a good profit flying the
Blind Faith
, enough to keep him content and let him pretend that he lived a playboy existence, so Rlinda would not take pity on his loneliness.
But the small fleet’s easygoing success had careened to a halt when this alien trouble began. Rlinda had lost the
Great Expectations
to Rand Sorengaard’s pirates, and now three of her other ships had been commandeered by the EDF. In order to keep his pilot’s
license and a ship to fly, Branson Roberts found himself forced to run errands for General Lanyan.
