Chapter Text
Captain Alanna Cheung gazed at the repeater displays on the bridge as HMS Palamedes glided gently towards the Manticore Wormhole Junction. She literally couldn’t count the number of times she’d made transit through the Junction, but it still never failed to awe her. The grandeur of the Junction itself; the sight of starships bursting into reality sheathed in the gossamer wings of their sails; even the knot of trepidation in her heart at the prospect of sailing through a hole in spacetime.
Palamedes might have been an older Star Knight-class cruiser, but she was still capable, and Alanna had no doubts about her crew either. They were off to join Admiral Kuzak’s fleet at Trevor’s Star, and to defend that most critical of beachheads from the Peeps.
She leaned down to check the numbers again. It was almost time…
Now.
“Ms Gray?” she said, glancing over at the helm. “Reconfigure forward impeller to sail.”
“Aye, ma’am,” replied the young noncom, and her fingers danced on the controls for a moment. Palamedes seemed to quiver. Externally, nothing had changed, but her wedge had just dropped to half strength, and she slowed even further from her already-minimal speed.
“Reconfigure aft impeller on my mark…” Alanna said. She glanced at the display again. It flashed as Palamedes moved forward – far enough into the Junction now for the frozen funnel of hyperspace that was an active wormhole to let her sails do the work. “Mark!”
The heavy cruiser’s wedge disappeared altogether, and for a heartbeat she hung there, unshielded but moving, before, with a flash of hyper energy, she disappeared.
Alanna knew at once that something had gone terribly wrong.
It wasn’t just that – instead of the brief-but-unsettling feeling of a Junction transit, as you ceased for an infinitesimal sliver of time to exist – the transit had felt more like a crash translation from the iota bands. She could see two ratings who appeared to have passed out, and several of her officers were clearly in the grip of severe nausea.
It was that she could see very clearly, on her repeaters and even out of the viewport, that neither Admiral Kuzak’s fleet, nor San Martin, nor even Trevor’s Star itself was visible.
Instead, two ships — enormous, impossible ships, dwarfing her own cruiser, four times as long as a superdreadnought — hung there, within visual range. We’re dead, her tactical instincts whispered, for a warship unprotected by her impeller wedge and sidewalls was the easiest possible prey for an attacker who’d made it this close.
She mastered her terror; it was impossible to say where they were, or how they’d got there, but the crew of Palamedes was counting on her. “Tactical, reconfigure to wedge now! Engineering, damage report! Helm, maximum acceleration on a bearing of—”
“Skipper!” she heard from her left. She whirled. Her first officer, Roland Yates, had spoken, and she knew him well enough to know he would never have interrupted an order without very good reason.
“Captain,” he said urgently, “without an absolutely solid astrogation fix, we’ll never get home. This must be an uncharted terminus of the Junction, and if we don’t…”
She pressed her lips together. He was right, of course, but those terrible ships…
“We can’t find our way home if they blow us out of space,” she retorted, but her voice was a little calmer. “Helm, roll ship to interpose the belly band; the second we have impellers, give me a skew turn to bring us on to a least-time course for the hyper limit, at maximum military power. Astrogation, get me that course, and then start surveying the stars – see if you can figure out where we are. Engineering, once you have that report, prepare a buoy for release at our reversion point.”
A chorus of acknowledgments filled the bridge, and her people got to work. A message flashed on her terminal – Hannah Villanova reporting a disturbance in the alpha nodes that was slowing the process of bringing up the wedge. She estimated two minutes to reroute.
Less than a minute later, Adewale Cass, her comms officer, stiffened. “Signal from the unknown ships, Ma’am,” he called. “Video and audio. But I can’t understand it; I’m not even sure it’s in English.”
“Bring it up,” Alanna replied. “Let’s see who our hosts are.”
The main screen flared to life, and several people gasped. Alanna herself took a half-step back.
Filling the screen was a giant of a man, wearing some bizarre variant on powered armor – she’d seen marines in armor often enough, but this seemed to be made of massive crimson-dyed plates, with huge spikes that seemed to serve no purpose at all. The man himself was scarcely less intimidating – and plainly furious.
“Live mic, Ma’am”, Cass said, his voice sounding shaken.
“This is Captain Alanna Cheung of Her Majesty’s Ship Palamedes,” she said, forcing her own voice into an even tone. “We apologize for our intrusion into your space; we believe that –”
The figure cut her off with a roar. He spat out something that she couldn’t quite catch – in German, she thought; were they somehow in Andermani space? but surely this was no Andermani ship – and made a chopping-off gesture at something out of picture. The feed cut out, and she could see the ships – as spiky as their commander – begin to rotate their broadsides towards Palamedes.
“Hannah, I need that wedge up now,” Alanna snapped.
“Nearly got it!” her chief engineer replied tautly. Even as she spoke, Palamedes’ alpha nodes seemed to shudder, and the wedge surged to life. And not a moment too soon: bare seconds after the wedge came up, the mysterious ships opened fire.
If Alanna hadn’t known better, she would have said they were firing physical cannon. There were some lasers and – probably – grasers in there, but many of the projectiles were much slower than light, and had no impeller drives. Not that it mattered – Palamedes’ wedge could have stopped a direct hit with a contact nuke – but it was odd, and she filed that thought away for later.
“Maximum acceleration!” she said, and Palamedes sprang from her pursuers.
Quite slow pursuers, at that. As they widened the distance, CIC’s preliminary estimates on the mystery ships’ capabilities came up on her terminal, and while they massed something like sixteen times what the largest superdreadnought in the fleet did, they barely seemed to be pulling a hundred gravities. And – in the panic of their chaotic transit, she hadn’t noticed – they didn’t have impeller wedges. Could it be that they were using fusion torches, or even chemical reaction drives?
She had little time for that. “All right, people, opinions,” she said, as the enemy vessels fell further and further behind and Palamedes sprinted for the hyper limit. “What are we looking at? And did anyone get anything out of that transmission?”
Lieutenant Commander Mei Wellesley, her tactical officer, raised a hand. “I think it’s a strange dialect of German,” she said, “although I’ve never run into anything quite like it before. But if I heard right, what he said translates to… ‘blood for the blood god’?”
Two hours had passed since the altercation at the terminus, and in that time little had changed aboard Palamedes.
The cruiser raced on towards the hyper limit, no longer threatened by the massive, spiked warships, but by no means safe. Astrogation had yet to determine where in the galaxy they were, and without that knowledge, their only possible route home was the terminus that they had just fled. For that matter, they couldn’t safely translate out until they knew where they were, for if the system lay within a grav wave, making their alpha translation with the wedge up would destroy Palamedes instantly.
And, of course, if they decelerated as they approached the hyper limit to buy time, their erstwhile pursuers would reach attack range again — even a paltry hundred-gravity acceleration rate would let them catch up eventually, and with an insurmountable velocity advantage to boot.
The problems didn’t end there. Palamedes had been fitted out with provisions, and hydrogen, for a short deployment, suitable for transiting from the home system to Trevor’s Star and for initial patrols; while BuShips was somewhat fanatical about building in cushion, they could only stay in space for so long – weeks, perhaps a month at the outside – without re-provisioning. Oxygen would last longer, thanks to the ship’s hydroponics department, but the difference between a drifting ship with oxygen and a drifting ship without oxygen was simply time elapsed. Even if they worked out how to return to known space, it was entirely possible that the distance would be too great, and that they would starve to death in hyper on the way home.
And wherever they were, it was far from home. That was certain. Plenty of colonies had regressed so far technologically that they’d lost any knowledge of how to build a starship, and had had to rediscover the principles from trial and error, so starships propelled by fusion torch weren’t out of the question… but any colony in such dire technological straits would surely have only had the ability to build light craft, LACs and frigates and the like, not these behemoths.
Alanna gazed at her crew, working feverishly to keep the ship running, to keep them in motion, to figure out where they were and what had happened and what those monstrous ships had been. She had no more idea than they as to the answers, but her instincts told her that they had become one of those rare ships that never emerged from a Junction transit… and that only a tremendous dose of luck would get them home again.
“Captain?” Lieutenant Conners, her astrogator, said into her thoughts. “I think I have something.”
She shook her head slightly, trying to shake off the sense of doom that had filled her ever since they made transit, and then rose. “Talk to me, Volodymyr,” she said, crossing to his station.
“I’m not sure of it, Ma’am,” he said as she leaned down to peer at his display, “but I think this is Hildesheim. The star patterns are wrong, but they’re consistently wrong, and if you apply a consistent contraction algorithm to them, you get something reasonably close to what the database says the night sky from Hildesheim ought to be.”
“Degree of certainty, Mr Conners?” she asked, and he shrugged.
“I don’t think I could give you a quantitative estimate, Ma’am,” he replied, “but that being said, it’s the closest match by far; nothing else has given me anything useful. The database could be wrong, or…” he trailed off. “Or something else. But if the database is right, then allowing for that contraction algorithm, we’re very likely in Hildesheim.”
Alanna considered that. Hildesheim was a fairly marginal single-system polity, well outside the Solarian League. The only reason she’d even heard of it was that Hildesheim had, about a decade back, been thought to contain a wormhole – possibly even a terminus of the Junction – and the RMN had sent a survey vessel to investigate, one commanded by an old friend of hers from Saganami Island. The survey had turned up nothing, and the brief flurry of interest had subsided. Guess they missed something, she thought mordantly.
“Hm,” she said. “Good work, Lieutenant. Roland, a moment?”
Yates crossed the bridge to them and glanced at the display. “Hildesheim,” he said thoughtfully. “That’d put us, what, about a month out from the Matapan Terminus? By our clocks, I mean.”
“That’s what I make it,” she said, nodding. “There are closer planets, of course, but none that get us meaningfully closer to the home system. And we’re in a rift, so we can translate out without any issue.”
She thought for a moment, then crossed back to her command chair. “Helm, time to the hyper limit, assuming no changes to our course or acceleration profile?”
“Niner-seven point three minutes to the inner zone, Ma’am,” Serena Gray said promptly. “One hundred six point eight to the clear limit.”
“Understood,” Alanna said. “My intention is to go to hyper only once we reach the clear limit, just in case.”
She rose. “Mr Cass, you have the bridge,” she said. “All other senior officers, to the ready room, if you please.”
As she seated herself at the head of the table, Alanna glanced around it. Most of the officers in this compartment had served with her for at least a few T-years; only Dr. Yi, their Beowulfan-born medical officer, was newly arrived, and she had settled in fairly quickly during their working-up period.
“All right,” she said. “As several of you know, we appear to have passed through an uncharted terminus of the Junction. Lieutenant Conners has turned up some fairly convincing indications that we’re in Hildesheim, clear on the other side of the League, and I’m choosing to proceed on that assumption.” She paused. “Yes, Lieutenant?”
Volodymyr Conners lowered his hand. “Ma’am, I want to note one countervailing factor in my analysis, which is that I, er, can’t find Hildesheim.”
Alanna frowned. “Explain.”
“The stars are right, allowing for the correction we discussed,” he said, “and the other planets are about where they should be, but I can’t detect Hildesheim itself anywhere. There’s what looks like an asteroid ring in roughly the same orbit, but unless we want to assume that something destroyed the planet…” He trailed off, and a shiver ran around the compartment. Everyone knew that actually blowing up a planet was the stuff of science fiction… but then again, so were four-kilometer-long super-superdreadnoughts.
“That’s definitely concerning,” said Roland Yates, “but we’re not really in a position to investigate, not with those… things… hanging around the inner system. Honestly, that’s probably a matter to pass on to the Sollies. Hildesheim may not be a League member, but they’re not too far from the Protectorates, and the SLN can investigate it.” And, Alanna thought wryly, their Battle Fleet is in a hell of a better position to take on those ships than anything we can pry loose from the war!
She nodded. “I concur, Commander. I’ll include a recommendation to that effect in my dispatch to the Admiralty when we reach Manticore. Which brings me to my next point: Erzsebet, Hannah, I need an assessment of our endurance. I intend to proceed to Matapan rather than the home system. Thoughts?”
“It’ll be tight, Skipper,” said Hannah Villanova immediately, “very tight.” The tall, dark chief engineer had always been good at anticipating Palamedes’ needs – and Alanna’s – and she wasn’t surprised that she had the answer ready. “Our hydrogen bunkers are full enough to carry us most of the way to the terminus, and I think if we take down a few redundant systems we’ll have enough power to carry us through the transit, but not more than that.”
Alanna nodded again, and turned to Erzsebet Kaur, her logistics officer. Lieutenant (junior grade) Kaur was new to her rank and responsibilities, but she’d been on the supply track since her snotty cruise, and Alanna trusted her judgment.
“It’s not quite as dire on our side, Ma’am,” Erzsebet said, “but we’ll be running near the edge of our food stores even in a best-case scenario. We were provisioned for a short deployment, and while I, ah, took the liberty of augmenting our stores before we left Weyland, a trip to Matapan will mostly deplete them.” She shook her head, which set her red curls swaying. “I think we’ll be all right getting to the home system, so long as we have basic rationing in place, but I wouldn’t want to promise you much more than that. I’ll have a rationing plan on your desk by 0800.”
“All right,” Alanna said, “thank you both. Mei, next, I want you to take us through the weapons and tactics we observed as we transited—”
The meeting had gone smoothly, Alanna thought. Which itself was strange, given how little else was going smoothly about today, but she wasn’t going to complain.
Shifting her white beret from her shoulder to her head, she stepped out of the lift, waving Adewale Cass back to his seat as he rose to announce her presence. Naval discipline was well and good, but she’d never much liked officers who insisted on pomp and circumstance aboard ship.
“CPO Gray, report, please,” she said.
The helmswoman raised her head from her display. “Yes, Ma’am. We’re two point three minutes from the inner zone, eleven point eight from the outer limit. Based on Lieutenant Conners’ data and what we can get from the Warshawskis, we’re not in a grav wave here, so we can translate with the wedge up.”
“Very good, Ms Gray,” Alanna replied. “We will translate as soon as we reach the outer limit, as planned.”
The minutes crept by, and Alanna started to feel the tension seep into her. What if Volodymyr Conners had missed something? What if they really were in a grav wave, and translating with the wedge up would doom Palamedes? Too late to change anything now, but…
All too soon, the moment came, and the cruiser raced across the outer limit. And those warships were still coming.
“Helm, make alpha translation on my mark.” She paused, just for a moment, and then said, crisply, “Mark!”
HMS Palamedes disappeared from the universe, and the two titans that pursued her turned back.
As the lost cruiser vanished across the alpha wall, its sole nonhuman occupant – a treecat called Hotspur, adopter of CPO Serena Gray, warrior of the Cold Glade Clan – snarled and keened, his amber eyes flashing as he tried to intimidate the empty air.