The Orphan Alliance (The Black Ships Book 3) (32 page)

Khulmet, Khola

T
ommy
sat in a small MoonSilver around the corner from the branch of the Illustrious
Imperial Bank that served levels in the mid-eighties. They had managed to
determine that the subject habitually came here at break time. There was
definitely a chance that an ugly scene could break out and so Tommy had decided
on the café. Better to do this outside of the workplace.

“Subject is
en
route,” Kale’s
voice appeared in Tommy’s ear.

Tommy sat up, a cold shiver running down his spine. “Keeva,
can you cut the link for the next hour? I’ll be fine on my own, thanks.” Three
years ago, he had been so busy staying alive that he didn’t have time to be
nervous. This time was very different.

Good luck, Tommy.

Tommy struggled to bring his breathing under control. He
tried distracting himself with his tea, but seeing his shaky hands only made
things worse. He cast about the seating area, looking for something to occupy
his attention, and then he saw the subject.

She was crossing from the door to the sales counter,
completely absorbed by whatever work she had brought along on her slate.

Tommy watched as she ordered, feeling a tightness in his
chest as he imagined running his fingers through that tumbling black hair. He
tried to look calm, but he knew he had a ludicrous grimace on his face as she
turned with her mug and headed toward the tables.

Toward him.

She scanned the tables as she approached, looking right at
him before her eyes swept on. She stopped in her tracks and turned her gaze
back to where he sat.

Whatever emotion displayed on her face, Tommy had no idea.
She certainly didn’t seem thrilled. She looked down, clearing her slate before
walking over to drop it on the table.

After a short pause, she sat, taking a sip before setting
the mug down next to her handheld. Tommy had played this moment out in his head
a thousand times, imagining what she might say, what he might respond with.

She said nothing.

Better than a poke in the eye with a blunt stick,
Tommy thought nervously.
She hasn’t started yelling yet.
The longer
things went like this, he knew, the harder it would get for him to say
anything.

But what to say? Every scenario he had imagined had been in
response to what
she
might say.

He suppressed the urge to sigh. “I know,” he began lamely,
“three years is a lot longer than either of us expected when I left here…” He
trailed off.
Where exactly was I going to go with that?

 Her expression softened a fraction. “Did you manage to
prevent the destruction of your world?”

“I did,” he said, seizing her metaphorical life preserver.
“There was a ship there, just like the
Dark Defiance
and it’s willing to
leave our people to their own devices.”

“And that took three years?”

“Umm…” The life preserver suddenly turned into an anvil. “We
sorted that out quick enough, but there were other worlds in danger.” He
gestured helplessly. “We had to try to save them as well. It turns out there
are a lot of these ships out there.”

“And you managed to find them all in three years?”

“Not quite,” Tommy leaned forward. “There are still more to
find, but I...”

“But you took this long to decide if you want to come back?”
Her voice was edged with a cold sadness.

Tommy shook his head. “That’s not fair. There are fifty
million people alive today because we were there for them a few months ago.”

He had come to terms with that disaster. Had they not shown
up, the
Firm Resolve
might have slumbered for thousands of years, but it
would have emerged eventually. Instead of displacing fifty million refugees,
the ship would have killed billions of their descendants.

“We also helped end a war, or at least – we slowed it down.
We helped to broker an armistice between our people and the Dactari Republic a
few weeks back.

Her eyebrows lifted at this. The Dactari were little more
than warriors from old legends on Khola. Until Gelna had arrived with the crew
of the
Völund
, no Dactari had been seen since the fall of the empire,
thousands of years ago.

“We’d gotten into a routine, going from world to world.” He
leaned back in his chair. “The peace deal includes a Bolshari observer. Seeing
her triggered something. I’d been refusing to deal with it because I didn’t
think there was anything I could do.”

“What changed your thinking?”

“The symbiotes controlling those ships think in terms of
thousands or even tens of thousands of years.” He inflicted a lopsided smile on
her. “My own species lived for nearly two hundred thousand years without being
destroyed. I think I can take some time out of my own short life to pursue
what’s
really
important.”

She took another sip, keeping her eyes on the table as she
cradled the mug in her hands. “Your timing could have been better,” she said
quietly. “Two years ago would have been much better.”

Tommy’s shoulders slumped. “You found someone?”

A quiet nod.

“I can hardly blame you. I might never have come back, as
far as you…”

“His name was
Bellik
,” Ailekna
said with a slight tremble in her voice. “He was a lieutenant in Kobrak’s
syndicate. We met the day you rescued me from Saramach’s compound.”

Was?
Tommy wanted to ask, but didn’t feel he had the
right.

“He died on a gas harvesting platform, three weeks before
the wedding.” She cuffed at her face. “It was a raid by a competing group. He
was killed, just to send a message to Kobrak.”

“I’m sorry,” Tommy said.

“You should be,” she whispered angrily. “If you hadn’t come
here in the first place, I never would  have met him. If you hadn’t gone
away, I never would have come to care for him.” She wiped away fresh tears.
“And I wouldn’t have felt guilty about not being able to care enough.”

Remorse and hope rampaged through his mind. He tried to
reach out for her hand, but her slate chimed and she snatched it up.

“I’m out of time,” she said tiredly. “Tommy, why are you
here?”

Out with it, you won’t get another chance.
“I want to
be with you.”

A sigh. “I don’t know, Tommy. We’re from different worlds.”

“But there’s strength in those differences,” he insisted
earnestly, “and there’s something amazing, where we’re the same.”

She stood looking down at the table for what seemed an
eternity. Her eyes came up to meet his. “I get off in two hours…”

The old Imperial frontier

“N
othing
at all?” Commander Will Fletcher demanded. “They were monks – they might not
believe in transmitters or power grids…”

The sensor coordinator shook his head. “No sir. No
transmissions from the surface, no heat signatures consistent with habitation.
We have ruins here on the main continent,” he offered, touching the screen to
bring up an overhead view of jungle encrusted stone walls and collapsed roofs.
“Also a few straight scars through the jungle but, if they were roads, then the
jungle’s been reclaiming them for at least two thousand years.”

This world – Planet 3428 – on the outer edges of the old
empire, had been given to an obscure religious order by
Khulmeti
– Emperor and third of his name. In gratitude, the monks had sent the emperor a
gift that the database referred to as
spice wood
– perhaps it had been
harvested here.

Proceeds from selling the gift had allowed
Khulmeti
to raise an expedition to add the world of Khola
to his dominions.  It had been a good deal for the Emperor – he gave a
back-water planet to some monks and their gift brought a gas-rich system into
the empire.

But what had happened to the monks?

“Maybe they were one of those male-only orders?” Commander
Heywood suggested drily. His Marine escort snorted in amusement. Alex ‘Sandy’
Heywood was one of the few officers the
Guadalcanal
couldn’t do without.
Maintaining a distortion drive was almost as much art as science and Heywood
knew the ship’s engines like no other man aboard.

He also had a particular knack for getting under Fletcher’s
skin. Heywood had never been a part of the mutiny, but they couldn’t have
afforded to let him leave with Captain Ulrich and the other ‘loyalists’. The
Guadalcanal
would have been stranded in short order if they tried to go any distance
without their chief engineer.

He was a permanent prisoner, and Fletcher was never allowed
to forget that.

Fletcher glanced briefly at Heywood. “Well?” he asked
simply, feigning an interest in a data stream from their shuttles in orbit.

A sigh and a long pause. “Yes,” he told the former first
officer, now the captain. He never said ‘sir’, pretending Fletcher had no
business in command and Fletcher reciprocated by pretending not to notice.
“It’s possible to scuttle the distortion emitters without harming the power
plants.”

“And mag-lift?”

A nod. “The mag-lifters draw from the generators on a
separate system. They’d be fine.” He leaned against a stanchion. “You plan on
marooning us all?”

“You know better than anyone how easy it is to spot an
active distortion drive.” Fletcher waved out the windows at the blue-green
world. “We don’t want the fleet
or
the Dactari to find us, so we’ve got
to go to ground and stay quiet.”

“We’re going to ground here?” Heywood frowned. “I thought we
were just taking on water here and then changing direction to throw off any
pursuit.”

“That was the plan.” Fletcher nodded at Chief Fryer as the
man approached. “But it looks like nobody’s home so we might just stay here.”
He turned back to Fryer, the chief nutritional specialist. “Chief, I’d like you
to get your survey team ready; we might be home.”

“No humanoids here, sir?”

“Doesn’t look like there’s been anybody here for thousands
of years, Chief. We’ll drop your crew near the ruins.”

Fryer was looking at the overhead view of the lost city,
scratching his
stubbled
chin. “Long time for any crop
plants to survive in modified form – probably died out or reverted to their
natural state.” He raised a speculative eyebrow. “Looks like the place is
fertile enough. Couple of days with the soil samples and we should be able to
find out if our own seeds will take hold here.”

“See if you can’t find something to make a tasty steak out
of while you’re down there,” Fletcher urged.

“If I can’t,” Fryer replied with a shrug, “I’m gonna
discover that the soil is ‘incompatible’ with Earth crops.” Without another
word, he turned and headed for the riser at the back of the bridge. Military
protocol was already starting to break down and Fletcher was reluctant to jump
on small infractions, having committed some pretty large ones in the last few
days.

How do you demand that a man wait for dismissal, when you’ve
stolen the ship from its rightful captain?

Fletcher turned back to the screens. “When you scuttle the
engines,” he resumed mildly, “see to it that it’s permanent.”

“A little drastic, isn’t it?” Heywood felt a vague sense of
alarm. He’d managed to hold out hope of returning to the fleet someday, but
that hope was growing thinner every day. “I could just
say
that it’s
permanent – who’d know otherwise?”

“I would,” Fletcher answered. “And so would you. I don’t
want the remotest possibility of changing our minds. We’re committed to our
course of action; leaving ourselves an ‘out’ will tear our people apart.”

Heywood wasn’t the only involuntary passenger on this
mutinied vessel. Several hundred crew as well as students from the fleet’s
combat-shuttle training program had been brought against their will. There
simply hadn’t been enough time to let them all leave.

Those personnel might settle to a new life, but not if there
was any possibility of getting the distortion drives operational.

“Get used to the idea, Sandy,” Fletcher turned to look his
former friend in the eye.

“We’re here to stay.”

T
he
plague has not only changed the nature of our species, but it has also changed
our center of mass. Though still technically our ‘home world’, Earth is
currently in no position to call the shots.

Our presence in the Dactari Republic is a permanent one and
it seems to be evolving into a feudal society. The Human and Midgaard
warlords
of the various planets will have centuries to solidify their positions before
handing power over to their descendants.

Though I didn’t see it as I was writing, this development is
reminiscent of the Nordic invasions of Britain that began with the raid on the
abbey at
Lindisfarne
on 8 June, 793. Adventurous
Northmen
carved out their own territories at the expense of
the Anglo-Saxons, leaving behind a homeland that had grown too small to support
them.

In this case, Earth is no longer able to support the fleet.
The worlds carved out of the Republic have provided the economic base we needed
to avoid extinction. No military force can last for long without a supporting
economy, and the Alliance expansion has provided us with a new lease on life
while, at the same time, interdicting the carefully crafted economy of the
Republic.

The raids on the Dactari logistics stations were inspired by
Allied raids in the Second World War, here on Earth. It has only recently been
made public that Commander Flemming (the real Commander Flemming) was waiting
offshore during the ill-fated raid on Dieppe. He was responsible for an
intelligence gathering operation which had targeted, among other things, the
German Enigma encryption machine.

Flemming, of course, went on to write the iconic Bond
series.

The Krypteian mutiny was inspired by the real-life mutiny of
a Soviet missile cruiser in the mid ‘
70’s
. The
purpose of the mutiny was similar to what takes place in this novel. The Soviet
officer’s aim was to ‘out’ the corruption of the current party leaders and
restore revolutionary ideals. The mutiny was put down and the Kremlin, not
wanting the real story to gain traction, allowed the equally juicy story of defection
to become the official explanation.

The mutiny of the
Storozhevoy
inspired an American insurance exec to write the first in an immensely
successful series of novels. Tom Clancy based his first book on this incident
and it went on to sell far more than the five thousand he’d originally hoped
for.

He remains one of my favorite authors and the world of
fiction is sadly diminished by his passing.

So what’s next for our series? Book 4,
Counterweight
will explore Cold War intrigue on the Republic world of Chaco Benthic, and it
will pick up the threads of a few outcasts.

We learn that Callum McKinnon’s execution hasn’t caught up
with the paperwork. Though he was sentenced to death by a military tribunal, he
spent a few years as a laborer on Petite Tortue Island before the plague forced
us to be less choosy about who we use as infiltrators.

With his proven track record at setting up insurgency cells,
Cal has been relieved of his carpentry duties and shipped off to Chaco Benthic
where he’ll be posing as a Tauhentan ex-patriot.

The descendants of the
Guadalcanal
are still out
there somewhere and they’ll play a pivotal role in the continuing story. Though
they don’t enjoy the longevity of the rest of the species, they have much to
offer, but only if the Alliance can recognize their potential.

Counterweight
went live on Amazon in May 2014. I’ve
included a sample below so you can try it out before deciding to buy.

A
s
always, if you enjoyed the story, a rating or a review is appreciated, but
certainly not obligatory. Reviews help a new story to gain traction, and the
current rate seems to be one per twenty-five hundred sales. A minimum review
grouping is a standard requirement for publicity sites like
BookBub
and the first book in this series is getting there, slowly but surely!

If you’d like to get in touch with me, I can be reached at:

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The Orphan Alliance
!

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Turn the page for a sneak preview of
Counterweight
,
book four in the series.