Warpath (15 page)

As the mission timer
ticked to thirty seconds, the revelry was over, and all bulkhead
doors were closing across the ship. A large wormhole formed in front
of the Triton. As the large ship and the Warlord attached to it
slipped inside, Jake caught a glimpse of a row of other medium sized
vessels approximately the size of the Warlord forming up behind them.
He knew who they were from the mission list, the reserves. If there
was a real engagement on the other side, something that they could
use help with, there were forty two more combat ready ships in the
Triton Fleet, all ready to join the fray at a moment’s notice.

The size of the Fleet
had Jake in awe, but he blocked out distractions and got ready for
what awaited them on the other side of the wormhole.

“Here we go,” Finn
sighed from his place at the Engineering station.

It hadn’t become
apparent to Governor Tate that he’d come to depend on the opinions
and advice of his houseguest, the enigmatic Wheeler, until the man
split off to go his own way for a day. He also trusted the man less
and less as the distance between them grew. He knew Wheeler was
keeping parts of his plan from him, and he suspected that time and
distance would enable him, and if there was one thing he recognized
in Wheeler, it was that he was a man that needed to be controlled.

The Governor had to put
that out of his mind, however. He watched as the buildings of Bafek
City drew nearer. The continent surrounding that tall skyline was a
pit of brown marshes and blackened wastes. The planet was host to
large deposits of heavy metals, and a unique soil mixture that
released rare chemicals when it was burned. Lursur’s land could be
burned until the entire continent was black, then tilled and burned
again hundreds of times before the expensive resource was fully
harvested.

His armoured shuttle
passed through the barrier that kept the tall city’s air clean, and
the grey-brown film that everyone outside of it had to live in. “May
I ask you a question, Governor?” asked one of his new Order
Knights. The soldier was a believer, a hero who saved two wealthy
families from a rebel attack on Governor Tate’s home world. He’d
also fought in the previous expansion as a boarding officer who was
involved in half a dozen successful combat operations. For the life
of him, Governor Tate couldn’t remember his name, but he was a
perfect fit for one of the four Order Knight positions he decided to
fill. The narrow faced helm muffled his voice, so it was almost
indistinguishable from the sound of the other soldiers around him.

“Please do, it might
distract me from the view,” Governor Tate replied.

“Thank you,”
replied the Knight, one of a pair he took with him for this trip.
“Isn’t it strange for our Lady to choose this as her first
meeting place in the solar system? Wouldn’t one of the cleaner
cities be a better choice?”

“She is here to
recruit,” Governor Tate said. “I suppose she believes that the
people here are ready to follow her because the place is so drab, but
most of the free people in Bafek live behind the barrier, in the
city, so I don’t know what she’ll accomplish.”

“I told you everyone
outside the barrier was on indentured contract,” said the other
Order Knight, a woman who was a celebrated police sergeant. Governor
Tate heard that there was an entire day and night of celebration when
she was given her position and the gift of immortality through the
new framework technology. “She can’t recruit people who still owe
money or are serving a punitive labour term.”

“Exactly,” Governor
Tate said. “But there are still some free people outside of the
clean air barrier, and on other continents that aren’t so heavily
worked. I suppose there are people who would rather live the
adventure of being an Order Follower.”

“If you pardon my
forwardness, it doesn’t sound like you believe, Governor,” said
the former police officer.

Governor Tate shook his
head slightly. “I’m denied my place in paradise,” he told her.
“As Governor I follow the calling to serve the public, and that
requires a practical mind,” he said, trying to keep the practiced
speech from sounding like a recitation. He crafted it at Wheeler’s
urging, a part of the man’s advice on how to trick his people into
thinking that he, their Governor, was one with the cause. The
purpose? To keep from being put in an adversarial position across
from Eve and her followers, something that Wheeler convinced him he
could not afford. “I can’t daydream of living on a lush world
where the food is fresh and plentiful, presented on a platter morning
noon and night. Those blue skies and perfect, sacred nights filled
with beautiful people are something you and your fellow Knights can
count on when you’ve earned your way to them, whereas I must
maintain the supply chains, the defence and practical considerations
that build such places,” the flowery speech seemed so gaudy,
overblown when he was practicing it with Wheeler, but aloud, in front
of two Order Knights and twenty-six trained soldiers who were
technically Regent Galactic military, it sounded like he really did
believe, and he had their attention without even trying. He paused,
sighed, and looked down at his hands as though they bore the
callouses of endless work. They were perfect, manicured and clean,
but he could almost convince himself of the fantasy. “Well, I will
be here for decades longer, making sure paradise can be real for
people just like you when your service elevates you to the worthy
position. When my work is done, there will be a place for everyone
who earns it, and maybe, just maybe there will be a place for me when
it’s time for me to put my burden down.”

“Thank you,
Governor,” said the hero soldier Knight. A few soldiers quietly
echoed his thanks.

The rest of the trip
took place in silence, and Governor Tate did his best to look as
though he was considering the burdens of caretaking for entire worlds
as he watched the tall buildings slowly pass outside. He couldn’t
wait for the shuttle to touch down so he could move on with his day,
and when they landed atop the central port spire, a tall, square
structure with bays for over a hundred small and mid-sized ships, he
couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.

The Order Knights led
the way, with soldiers surrounding him, keeping pace as they walked
down the broad ramp at the rear of the armoured shuttle. Five
fighters, their escort, hovered near the edges of the landing
platform. The unmistakeable scent of the Lursur continent, a slight
burnt smell that seemed to stick to the nostrils for days afterwards,
was in the fitful gusts of air around them.

A small Order of Eden
combat shuttle swept down and landed expediently at the other end of
the platform. As the ship eased onto the deck the ramp lowered, and
before it had completely come down a group of three youthful people
emerged, striding towards them. Something about their gait or
disposition made the soldiers around Governor Tate tense.

He couldn’t put his
finger on it, but there was something about them that made the
Governor uneasy. They wore some kind of slender equipment bag firmly
strapped to their left legs, and an unusual sidearm on their right
thighs. Their armour was unlike anything the Order had, smooth, with
flexible padding instead of plates, and coloured dark brown with
black. The colour shifted as they moved across the deck, making them
difficult to focus on.

As they drew to within
comfortable speaking distance, Governor Tate stepped forward to stand
between his heavily armed Order Knights, and stopped as he looked
into the eyes of the newcomers. Within their dark hoods he could see
that their skin was extremely pale, two of them had jet black hair,
while the one in the middle had perfectly white hair that was cut to
a practical short length. Their eyes were washed of colour, their
pupils and irises just grey enough to be distinguishable from their
perfect whites. “We come in service of Eve, to speak to Governor
Tate,” said all three in unison.

“I understood that
I’d be meeting with her personally,” Governor Tate said, trying
to act as though he wasn’t completely taken aback by the
performance.

“Lucius Wheeler
avoids her, but he is a close confidant of yours. You will have to
determine why he does not want to appear before her when he is so
concerned with helping you inject yourself into the centre of the
Order’s politics,” said the soldier in the middle.

“I don’t know what
she’s been told, but I have no choice but to get involved, with her
coming here.”

“She has not been
told,” the trio said together. “We just learned it from the
surface thoughts. Wheeler has become a part of your decision making
process in very little time, and we know the man’s history. He is
as dangerous as he is useful. You will have to appear with him at
your side if you wish to meet Eve in person. He must be read by a
Trio Cell, just as you have been.”

“I am the head of
government here, no one ranks above me, especially not Wheeler,”
Governor Tate protested. “He isn’t even a citizen.”

“We understand why
you may find our determination insulting,” the trio said. The white
haired woman in the centre stepped forward, speaking alone. “You
have to put that aside. Citadel is allied with Eve now, and she
trusts us to keep her safe so she can continue her work without
worry.”

“Citadel, I
understand,” Governor Tate said, doing his very best to disguise
the fact that he had no idea what Citadel was. A slight smile broke
the perfectly placid expressions of the trio in front of him, and he
could only suppose they could hear the ignorance in his thoughts –
if they could indeed read minds. It infuriated him, but he didn’t
care as long as his ignorance was hidden from his soldiers.

The trio turned to
leave and Governor Tate let them go, even though he wanted to force
them to produce Eve so she could answer his questions, so he could
influence her to leave his indentured workforce alone. He would
return with Wheeler, but not before he got some answers from the man
about Citadel and so many other pressing matters.

Admiral Terry Ozark
McPatrick could feel the tension in Hausgiest’s mind. It was in
direct relation to the ship. Fourteen fighters were resting in the
punters under the ship, all three hangars were ready to spring open
and launch three gunships each, and the Warlord rested on a main
mooring point, able to spring off at a moment’s notice. The torpedo
tubes were loaded, the new high energy particle weapons along the
bottom of the ship were fully charged, missile turrets were loaded
and ready behind their heavy hatches, and the gunnery deck along the
top of the ship was prepared, patient, and silent.

They emerged from a
very short trip through a wormhole, cloaked and manoeuvring away from
their entrance point into the space near the drifting asteroid field.
No one fired on their obvious position of arrival, and they were
clear in good time, making it nearly impossible for most ships to
find the Triton.

The Triton’s main
engines stopped flaring, manoeuvring thrusters and inertial shifting
systems took over as they maintained a smooth but irregular course
near the asteroid field. “There’s something wrong here,” said
one of the analysts in the sensor and signal monitoring section of
the bridge to Oz’s right.

“What’s that,
Henrietta?” he asked her. She wasn’t of military rank, but served
on the bridge, paid for her keen eye and years of experience with two
space exploration companies.

“The area around this
asteroid cluster is too neat. There is no sign that this large group
of high-mass bodies has drifted through something like a solar
system, picking up garbage and other small bits as it goes through.
That sort of thing isn’t just common, it’s inevitable, especially
in a system like Rega Gain, where bits of trash and old tech are
everywhere.”

“What does that tell
us?” Oz asked. “Do you think this is artificial?”

“Wait, Sir, I’m
checking the trajectory against charts we have on hand and a few
passive scans the Warlord did on recent patrols,” she said. All the
information came together in the middle of the bridge, where one of
the main holographic projectors displayed an image of the solar
system, the trajectory of the asteroid drift, and objects it would
have passed near as it came into the system. “Sir,” Henrietta
said tentatively as several red circles highlighted small outer solar
system meteor clusters and a large flotilla of old wreckage that was
slowly drifting away from the Rega Gain system. “There’s very
little chance that this asteroid cluster made it through all that
without hitting anything unless it was aimed, and that’s not
something I’ve seen.”

“It’s as though someone plotted
its course well in advance, knowing where all that would be,” said
Ensign Pallot beside her. “But that’s not the worst. Our passive
scans have enough information to confirm the Wing Commander’s
readings. The composition of those asteroids doesn’t match anything
for a light year along its course.”

Oz called up the
navigational charts for the region and checked the history of the
asteroid field. “It’s been in the navigational charts for nine
years,” he muttered to himself. Hausgiest broke through all this
thoughts with a realization. ‘Citadel is here!’

“Wait,” Oz said,
holding a hand up to ward him off.

“Yes, Sir,”
Henrietta said.

He didn’t bother
correcting her assumption that he was telling her to wait. ‘How do
you know?’ he asked Hausgiest.

“The Victory Machine
predicted that Haven Shore would be significant in the war, that it
would reveal the secret motivation behind the Order of Eden’s
formation and war. I can feel that something has been sent here to
stop whatever they are afraid of in the Rega Gain system.”