The Phoenix Rising (7 page)

That was a plausible motive, Calvin
supposed. But he doubted that was the only thing, perhaps not even
the primary thing that bound these Polarians to do the bidding of
the Organization. He didn’t press the issue though, since Mira was
unlikely to reveal anything more.

“
So you see, Mister Cross,
you either take the Polarians with you on your mission—or you
don’t, and you make things very hard for your limited personnel. I
don’t have any qualified human soldiers to offer you. Not on
Gemini.”

“
I’ll give you my answer by
the end of the day,” he said. Knowing that, most likely, he’d be
forced to take the Polarians aboard. But he wanted to run this by
Jason Pellew before making the final decision.

“
You have two hours, Mister
Cross. And not a minute more.”

“
Fine.” He turned to
leave.

“
One more thing,” she
said.

He spun back around, curious.

“
The Rotham you have with
you,” she said nonchalantly, as if this information was common
knowledge. “Alex, I believe is the crude name you gave him. What do
you intend to do with him?”

He was taken off guard by this. He’d kept
Alex under tight confinement since they’d arrived—under constant
watch, and hadn’t let him drift out into public where he could be
seen.

“
If I didn’t know any
better,” said Mira. “I’d say you look surprised that I know about
Alex.”

Then Calvin put it together. He’d left Alex
with Captain Pellew. He must have told his sister. That raised
questions about Pellew’s trustworthiness. The special forces leader
had mutinied to help Calvin restore his command, but he was also a
recruit of the Organization—and had made no efforts pretending
otherwise.

“
The Rotham is staying with
us on the Nighthawk,” said Calvin. “I’m going to get some
information from him.”

Mira nodded. “The Organization would
consider it a personal favor if, when you do find anything out from
him, you keep us informed.”

As if she didn’t already have plans for
Captain Pellew to keep her apprised over kataspace. Calvin made a
mental note to keep an eye on the ship’s communication logs. “I’ll
consider it.”

“
It’s not good for us to
keep secrets from each other. Remember that.”

“
You should too.” He looked
at her again, sizing her up one last time, then left. It was time
for a frank conversation with Mister Pellew.

***

Calvin barged into Pellew’s quarters
unannounced; the door was unlocked.

Pellew jumped up from the edge of his
bed—where he’d been sitting and watching a news program on the
large screen. He switched it off and looked at Calvin. “Hey. Have
you heard about Renora?”

“
Yes,” said Calvin quickly.
He hadn’t come here to discuss current events.

“
Hard to believe she was
behind it, huh? No one saw
that
coming.”

Calvin had come to ask a
serious question but this new information caught him
off-guard.
She?
“They identified the attacker?” he asked, deciding his other
question could wait.

“
Not officially,” said
Pellew. “But one of the Assembly members, on condition of
anonymity—
of course
, pointed the finger at Princess Kalila Akira. And then an
Intel Wing insider—also anonymous—confirmed it. So speculation has
gone wild. And it’s looking more and more like Kalila had something
to do with it. Who’d have thought, right?”

Calvin hadn’t told Pellew, or anyone, about
his clandestine meeting with Princess Kalila on Tau outpost. And he
still hadn’t made sense of the encounter. She’d asked him to
investigate Raidan for her, and avoid interfering with him. She
would eventually contact Calvin again at an unspecified time. So
far he hadn’t heard anything more from her.

Could she possibly be
involved in the bloodbath at Renora?
He
felt sick even considering it. There must be some other
explanation. Perhaps she was a scapegoat? Or maybe her ship had
been seized by some other power.

Of course, he knew he was biased. He didn’t
want to believe her capable of such an atrocious act. Something
about her had completely captivated him when they’d met. And, from
time to time, he caught himself fantasizing about the next time
he’d see her. Usually he could keep such thoughts in check. But not
always.

“
So what brings you here?”
asked Pellew.

Calvin set aside his
confusion towards Kalila and focused on the issue at hand. “I know
you work for the Organization,” he said. “The question I have is,
where do your deepest loyalties lie? And, if you had to decide
between them and the Nighthawk,
between
them and me
, which would you
choose?”

Pellew shrugged. “That’s a fair question. I
guess it depends on what the choice is. But I don’t think it
matters because our interests are aligned.”

“
For now, sure. But suppose
in the future they aren’t.” Calvin doubted Pellew’s words would
give him an honest answer, but he thought his eyes and body
language might.

“
I’d choose the Nighthawk,”
said Pellew. Calvin didn’t detect any of the telltale signs of
insincerity. But then again, Pellew might be a practiced
liar.

“
Why?”

“
Because I don’t really owe
the Organization anything. They struck a deal with me and I
delivered. You got to keep your ship and go to Abia, just like
Raidan wanted. I enabled Tristan, helped him escape confinement so
he could catch your scent and fulfill his mission on Aleator.
That’s pretty much the extent of it. I do what’s best for
me.”

“
I see,” Calvin thought
about what Raidan had said. They’d recruited Pellew by means of
blood and money. “And how was this deal struck exactly?”

“
My sister Mira contacted me
and convinced me. She works for the Organization.”

“
I know she does. In fact, I
know she’s here on Gemini.”

Pellew looked surprised, but
unthreatened. “You know quite a lot. Anyway she appealed to my
more…
benevolent side
at first, but I held out for money, which she eventually
offered. 160,000q was my price. Mitchell, Adams, and the others I
convinced were bought for much less.”

“
So it was about money,
then?”

“
It was, yes.”

“
Then why would you choose
the Nighthawk? I can’t offer you money.”

“
I don’t care about the
money anymore. My debts are paid. I have a fat savings account. At
this point, it’s about revenge. I lost friends in Abia.” There was
a sudden fire in his eyes, yet his voice remained calm. “You and
me, we’re going to avenge them. And those responsible, those
bastards who started all of this.
They’ll
pay.
As long as you’re working to find and
eliminate them, I’ll always have your back.”

Calvin nodded. It was against his better
judgment, but he believed Pellew. The man seemed far too sincere to
be faking it. But there was one missing piece. “Then why did you
tell your sister about Alex?”

“
I told her so she’d
understand that Abia wasn’t a complete waste. We may have lost a
third of the crew, but at least we took a prize. I didn’t think it
would be a problem for her to know.”

“
It isn’t,” said Calvin. “So
long as she understands that Alex is coming with us, not staying
here.”

Pellew folded his arms and gave Calvin a wry
look. “If we had kept Alex a secret from her, odds are she would
have found out anyway. Our whole crew knows we have him in our
possession. Any one of them could have leaked it to someone who
would then tell her. At that point she could have arranged for him
to mysteriously disappear into her possession. But now, if that
happens, it’s obvious she’ll be our first suspect. So she can’t
risk it. Before she had deniability. Now she doesn’t.”

“
Makes sense,” Calvin
admitted. Though he doubted that was the reasoning behind Pellew’s
decision to inform his sister—and he still expected Pellew to make
continued reports to the Organization on some level. “Where is Alex
now, anyway?”

Pellew nodded toward the adjoining bathroom
door. “Locked in there. No windows, no other doors, and no large
vents. Unless he flushes himself down the toilet, he’s not goin’
anywhere.”

“
You check on him
often?”

“
Every ten
minutes.”

“
That’s good,” Calvin had
few enough leads that losing Alex was not an option. As to what
he’d do with the Rotham once he’d bled every scrap of information
out of him? That he hadn’t decided.

“
What’s the word on my
replacement troops? I’m a whole detachment shorthanded.” Pellew
reminded him.

“
We’ve been offered a
detachment of Polarian soldiers that are supposedly loyal to the
Organization. We have the choice of taking them or leaving
them.”

“
Are we expecting to deploy
any shore teams or do any capture operations in the near future?”
asked Pellew.

“
Yes. The Organization wants
us to find and capture a missing ship of theirs—the Arcane
Storm.”

“
And are we going to do
it?”

Calvin thought about it for a moment. There
was no reason not to—his ability to investigate the Phoenix Ring
was limited to whatever Rafael could manage, now that they’d been
cut off from the Intel Wing databases. And it wouldn’t hurt to gain
more favor from the Organization—even if he didn’t fully trust it.
Not to mention, if there was something special about this missing
ship, Calvin would want to see it for himself. “Yes. We are.”

“
And how many crew does the
Arcane Storm carry?”

“
About thirty,” said
Calvin.

“
Then we need the additional
soldiers,” said Pellew. “Even if they aren’t imperials.”

“
Even if that means aboard
soldiers who will turn on us later?”

“
I doubt they would,” said
Pellew. “Polarians aren’t known for going against their word. In
all of our joint history I don’t think they’ve ever so much as
breached a treaty.” That was true, though Calvin reminded himself
that Pellew was perhaps as loyal to the Organization as the
Polarians. “So unless their beloved High Prelain tells them to,
they wouldn’t turn on us.”

Calvin knew the Polarians were deeply
spiritual people and he’d never quite understood how the power was
split between the secular politicians of the Confederacy and the
religious leaders. One thing was certain, if the High Prelain did
order the Polarians to war against the Empire, billions would
follow his spiritual advice and give up everything for the
cause.

“
Should the worst happen,”
asked Calvin, wanting to know one more thing before giving Mira the
go-ahead to begin boarding Polarian troops onto his precious
Nighthawk, “what are our chances against a Polarian detachment in a
straight fight?”

“
Polarian soldiers are some
tough sons-of-bitches,” said Pellew, giving Calvin a grim look.
“But my men are expertly trained. Between us and the crew, and the
fact that we know our own ship backwards and forwards? Yeah, I’d
bet we could take them.”

Just then the comm panel chirped and Pellew
answered. “What is it?”

“
Captain Pellew, is Calvin
with you?” asked a junior officer.

“
Yes he is.”

“
Good. Please come here
right away, both of you, to the lab on deck seventy-eight. There’s
something you need to see.”

Chapter 6

“
What is it?” asked Calvin
as he and Pellew entered the lab. Three analysts from the Nighthawk
were hovering around one of the many computer terminals. He
recognized them all, junior officers from the Red Shift.

“
A little while ago we
finished analyzing the data we got back from the probe we launched
to investigate the TR-301 star collapse,” said Ryan—he was a junior
lieutenant and one of the Nighthawk’s ranking analysts. “What we
found is…
strange
.
To say the least.”

“
What is it?” Calvin had
almost forgotten about the bizarre, and untimely, destruction of a
major star that had forced them into making a course correction on
their way to Aleator, ultimately slowing down their pursuit of
Raidan. He’d sent a probe to investigate it and hadn’t thought much
of it since.

“
By all rights the star
should not have collapsed. It had billions of years of life left in
it. Our grasp of stellar physics is not complete, but from what we
do know—TR-301 should not have collapsed. You were right to send a
probe, Captain.”

“
So what did you
find?”

“
We found traces of isotome.
Most of it was in a degenerated state and not really recognizable,
but some of it was stable and, somehow, preserved.”

“
Like what we found in the
Rotham ship debris?” asked Calvin. He kept quiet about the fact
that the Arcane Storm was suspected of transporting isotome as
well.

“
Exactly. Whatever
stabilizing process or agent the Rotham used to transport their
isotome matches exactly the isotome found by the probe in the
TR-301 region. What’s more, based on the properties of the TR-301
star, the expected result of a normal gravitational collapse would
have been the formation of a neutron star. However this was a
massive collapse, much larger than it should have been, and a
blackhole formed within seconds.”