Standing Alone

(Cast Adrift II)

Christopher G. Nuttall

Book One: Cast Adrift
Book Two: Standing Alone

http://www.chrishanger.net
http://chrishanger.wordpress.com/
http://www.facebook.com/ChristopherGNuttall

Cover By Tan Ho Sim
https://www.artstation.com/alientan

All Comments Welcome!

Cover Blurb

Five years ago, the human race became independent as the Alphan Empire conceded it could no longer sustain its grip on Earth and withdrew, casting an unprepared humanity adrift on an interstellar sea of troubles.  Since then, humanity has struggled mightily to secure its position in a galaxy full of hungry predators, many of whom see Earth as nothing more than a prize to be won.

Now, one of the galaxy’s superpowers has set its sights on Earth, launching a covert campaign to weaken and isolate the human race before it moves in for the kill.  As their plan comes into the open, and the scale of the threat becomes apparent, the human race finds itself caught between a war it cannot win and shameful submission to dangerously inhuman race ...

... And if Earth loses the war, humanity’s short-lived independence will come to an end once again.

Prologue I

From: A Short History of Galactic Civilisation Volume XXVI.  Alphan History University (Terran Campus).  505PI.

Precisely how isolated Earth was from galactic society, prior to the Alphan Invasion and Conquest of 1PI, has been hotly debated over the years.  The invasion and attendant devastation did a great deal of damage to humanity’s records, as might be expected, but rumours of pre-invasion non-human contact persisted for several decades.  The Alphan Viceroyalty was concerned enough about some oddly specific rumours to invest considerable effort in trying to determine what, if any, truth lay behind the stories; the investigation produced little beyond rumours of crashed alien spacecraft and bodies held in top secret facilities, none of which could be confirmed to exist (or had ever existed).  If there was pre-invasion contact, it almost certainly passed unnoticed.

Regardless, Earth’s isolation from the galactic mainstream came to an end when the Alphan Conquest Fleet decloaked in orbit and opened fire.  The human defences, such as existed at the time, were unable to do more than irritate the invasion force, which swiftly wiped out all mobile forces on the planet’s surface before landing troops to take possession of important strategic points and impose their will on the human race.  Human resistance was formidable, in places, but with possession of the high orbitals firmly in enemy hands the outcome was inevitable.  Most human nations surrendered within two weeks of the invasion and die-hard resisters found it impossible to prevent the invaders from going wherever they wanted, whenever they pleased.  The Alphans had good reason to believe that humanity would become just another subject race, one to exploit for everything from raw materials to military manpower.

At first, it seemed they were right.  Humans rapidly entered service at all levels of industry.  Many humans had no qualms about taking on the dirtiest and riskiest of jobs, from mining asteroids in interstellar wastelands to skimming gas giant atmospheres for rare gases and minerals.  Others joined the Alphan military and served in various units, fighting to maintain and even expand the alien empire.  It seemed likely, as humans inched their way further and further into the interstellar civilisation, that they would eventually carve out a place for themselves in society.  Indeed, to some extent they did.  Humanity was encouraged to settle and develop seven star systems within a handful of light years of Earth, while Earth’s steadily-growing orbital industry and merchant fleet - primitive compared to their masters, but larger with every passing year - took humans right across explored space and far beyond.  The Alphans believed it would go on forever.

It did not.  

First, as humanity became more and more important to the empire’s economy, they started to demand a say in how the empire was governed.  The Alphans were unsure how to handle the matter and, eventually, ended up angering both sides.  The growth of a representative human government, with very limited powers, bolstered the demand for more rights within the empire, even as it ensured it would be harder to convince the empire to grant anything of the sort.  

Second, the Alphan Empire fought two wars in quick succession with the Lupines, an alien race technologically inferior to the Alphans but possessed of vast numbers and determination that more than evened the odds.  It was conceded, in the wake of the Second Lupine War, that only human involvement had saved the Alphans from an expensive and potentially catastrophic defeat.   And it was felt, on Earth, that humanity deserved - now - to be considered true partners in empire, equal to the Alphans themselves.

The Alphans hesitated.  It was impossible for them to concede equality to a race that hadn’t so much as settled its own moon, let alone started to explore multispace, before encountering alien life.  They had a tendency to regard humanity as not only primitive, but foolish.  Unlike many other races trapped in gravity wells, the human race could have climbed out before the invasion took place.  And yet, they were uneasily aware of how greatly they depended upon human labour.  The Alphan Empire had invited millions of humans to emigrate.  If those humans turned into a threat, the results would be disastrous.  

After much debate, they chose to cut their losses.  Earth and its neighbouring worlds were granted independence.  The Earth Defence Force - composed of humans who had once fought beside their Alphan masters - was released into Earth’s control.  The Alphans waited long enough to ensure a reasonably stable passing of the torch, then pulled out of the Human Sector completely.  Humanity was on its own.

It did not take long for predators to come calling.  The Vulteks, a primitive race that had been uplifted by the Pashtali, challenged the human navy and, after convincing themselves the human race was a paper tiger, launched an invasion.  The enemy thrust their way to a crossroad star system, where their fleet was trapped and destroyed in a desperate battle.  Unwilling to give the Pashtali any time to support their clients, the EDF took the offensive and fought its way to the Vultek homeworld.  The Pashtali arrived barely in time to save the Vulteks from a brutal defeat, ensuring that humanity’s victory would be incomplete.  It was, however, more than enough to ensure Earth would take its place amongst the galaxy’s major players.  As peace descended, the human race looked to the future ...

... And, as five years passed, came to realise the peace was unlikely to last. 

Prologue II

From: Captain Thomas Anderson, CO James Bond
To: First Admiral Adam Glass, Commander Solar Navy (Earth Defence Force)
Subject: Galactic Geopolitics

Admiral,

As per your request, I have submitted my formal report to the EIS prior to writing this message.  I must warn you that a considerable amount consists of nothing more than speculation, of whispers and rumours that may have no more substance than the claim the Elder Gods are about to return and judge us all for our sins.  My tour of the neighbouring star systems has been informative, as the report says, but I cannot substantiate much.  I have had to leave certain details out of the official report because they cannot be confirmed.

We had hoped, despite everything, that the Alphans would rally their people to the cause and stabilise their empire.  They haven’t.  Since granting Earth independence, the Alphans have done the same to three more races, two of which are primitive and unlikely to offer any real challenge to their masters if they decided they wanted to rebel.  From what I’ve heard, the Alphan Empire is in full retreat.  A number of important crossroads, economically as well as militarily, have simply been abandoned.  It is only a matter of time before one of the other Galactics moves in and takes them.  I doubt we could secure them ourselves, even if we had the deployable forces, if a more powerful race wanted them.

It is impossible, as of writing, to get a solid idea on how much military hardware remains in Alphan possession, but I’ve heard rumours that suggest warcruiser losses in the war were far higher than we supposed.  I have been unable to confirm these rumours - and some of them are nothing more than whispers and wishful thinking - yet it is clear the Alphans no longer have the will to patrol the space outside their core worlds.  They have stepped down everything from crossroad custom stations to deep space outposts and, if some of the wilder rumours are to be believed, even evacuating their personnel from multispecies worlds.  It is clear they’re withdrawing as much as possible to their core worlds.

This raises a worrying issue, sir.  Who is going to be the next galactic hyperpower?

It is not an easy question to answer.  The Alphans were the power, as far as they and everyone else were concerned.  They possessed enough firepower to make life difficult for the remaining Galactics, even if they had to fight them all at once.  It was they who enforced Galactic Law, such as it is.  As of writing, going by official reports, there is no power capable of taking their place.   Unofficial reports suggest the major powers are rapidly building up their forces.  The Alphans have created a power vacuum and their rivals are moving to take advantage of it.

I think, off the record, that the Pashtali will be the major threat.  They took no part in either the Lupine Wars or the Vultek War, save at the very end.  They have long wanted to replace the Alphans as the predominant power in explored space, seeing the Alphans as a bunch of lucky bandits, if I may make so bold, rather than the destined masters of the known universe.  Quite aside from that, they also regard us as threats; they have good reason to fear what we, and our neighbours, will do if given time.  I’m surprised they haven’t put pressure on us already.  Given the Alphan retreat, that may be about to change.

Political suggestions are a little outside my bailiwick, but I do have some observations...

Chapter One

ESS Magellan, Deep Space

There were people, Captain Ashleigh Harlem had discovered on the first day she’d reported for survey training, who couldn’t endure multispace.  They looked through portholes at the eerie shimmering lights of multispace and recoiled, or threw up, or started screaming.  Indeed, the Alphans based their claim to superiority on the simple fact that they found multispace almost homey, to the point they knew far more than any other race about manipulating the fabric of multispace and the threadlines running through it.  It was the Alphans, alone amongst the Galactics, who could drop out of multispace wherever they liked.  It had given them a priceless tactical advantage.

She sat in her command chair and studied the displays as Magellan picked her way through the endless energy surges and gravitational eddies.  They weren’t that far from the shipping lanes, but they might as well have been on the other side of the galaxy.  Her sensors weren’t picking up any other ships, not even patrolling cruisers and destroyers prowling the edge of the core worlds.  Alphan space, she reminded herself.  The days when the core worlds had been her core worlds were long gone.  It was strange, almost eerie, that they’d seen so few ships during the deployment.  There’d been a time when the threadlines were practically crowded with starships, from freighters carrying raw materials back to the core to warships patrolling the edge of explored space.  Now ...

Interstellar trade will recover, she told herself.  And when it does, we will need accurate charts once again.

It wasn’t easy, but she forced herself to relax.  She’d been in the interstellar survey service from the day she’d graduated, hoping - against all logic and reason - that she’d be granted a chance to take a ship beyond the furthest reaches of explored space.  Updating charts and keeping a wary eye on energy storms in multispace was important - she wouldn’t have been in the survey service if she hadn’t understood just how important - but it wasn’t a chance to plunge into the unknown.  She’d grown up on tales of brave explorers - Alphans - who had steered their ships along previously unexplored threadlines, locating and logging star systems that could be claimed and exploited by their empire.  She’d heard stories of strange sights and encounters within multispace, including incomprehensible artefacts from long-gone races and godlike entities guarding the gates to heaven or hell.  Most of the stories were absurd, the sort of tall tales spacers told when they wanted to make their profession sound glamorous; she’d discovered, over the years, there was more truth in them than any groundpounder believed.  Who knew what might be lurking beyond the next threadline or on the far side of an unexplored crossroads?  She wanted to be the first to see the unknown ...

Her lips curved into a grim smile.  Soon.  The human race was free again, free to explore without the guiding hand of their former masters.  She’d been told, in confidence, that as the Solar government asserted itself, humanity would start sending survey ships into the unknown, in hopes of finding inhabitable colony worlds or making first contact with new alien powers.  She had every intention of being one of, if not the, commander on a deep space exploration mission.  She’d spent her entire life preparing for the plunge into the unknown.  She was ready.

She put the thought out of her mind as she studied the console.  The multispace topography - one of her instructors had once compared it to crawling across the ocean bed - seemed unchanged.  The random energy fluctuations of multispace barely registered on the sensors.  She was almost disappointed - and yet, something nagged at her.  The economic slowdown had affected everyone, with fewer and fewer ships setting out on speculative trading missions, but there should have been more ships in the threadline.  She frowned as she studied the edges of the clear route, her ship slowing along the edge of the threadline as her sensors probed the energy storms beyond.  Multispace was merciless - any solid matter within the threadline fell down to the crossroads and into realspace - but surely there should have been more.  

It was worrying.

Her fingers danced across the console, bringing up the long-range sensor readings and comparing them to the records on file.  It had been too long since the last survey mission.  The Alphans - who’d once conducted the missions as a matter of routine - seemed to have lost interest in carrying them out, although they’d reacted badly when some of the other Galactics had offered to do it for them.  Or so Ashleigh had been told.  It couldn’t be easy to have an up-and-coming younger race offering to do something for you, even if one was grimly aware of one’s advancing age.  Ashleigh’s grandmother had never liked her children and grandchildren treating her as an invalid, right up to the end of her life.  The Alphans must feel the same way.  They’d been masters of the known universe for so long that they had to find it hard to adjust to a universe that no longer automatically deferred to them.

And I wouldn’t be pleased if Ensign Simmons claimed he knew better than me, she reflected, with a hint of amusement.  Even if he did, it wouldn’t make me happy.

She kept her eyes on the display as the starship sped on.  It was a routine mission.  She did not, technically, have to be on the bridge.  There was no reason to think they’d come under attack - they were deep within explored space - or encounter something her XO couldn’t handle.  She knew she could go back to her cabin and do her paperwork - that was one thing that hadn’t changed, in the years following Independence - or even write proposals for deep space exploration.  Who knew?  The First Speaker and his government needed a success, now that the lustre of independence had been replaced by the urgent need to carve a place for humanity in a hostile universe.  Perhaps they’d support a deep-space exploratory mission ...

A low shudder ran through the ship.  Ashleigh looked up, sharply, as red lights flared on the display.  Multispace was rarely quiet - energy surges and twisted gravity waves were far from uncommon, seemingly flickering and flaring out of nowhere and vanishing as quickly as they’d come - but they were still some distance from the edge of the threadline.  They were certainly closer to it than a freighter would dare, yet ... her eyes narrowed as another wave of gravitational force crashed into the hull.  It shouldn’t have been there at all.

“Lieutenant Ellis,” she said, calmly.  It was unexpected, but hardly anything her crew couldn’t handle.  They’d trained on the assumption they’d be flying into unexplored and uncharted territory.  “Report.”

Lieutenant Ellis didn’t look up from his console.  “We just crossed a gravity wave, Captain,” he said, in a tone that suggested he didn’t believe his own words.  “The wave is actually twisted, to the point we hit it twice ...”

Ashleigh leaned forward as the display updated rapidly.  Multispace was weird.  For every threadline that cut years off one’s journey, there was one that added centuries.  It was quite possible to follow a threadline that linked two neighbouring stars together, only to discover the journey would have been quicker if the ships had remained in normal space.  She’d heard stories of spacers who’d spent a week in multispace, only to discover - when they reached their destination - that decades had passed.  It was rare, but it happened.  She’d even heard rumours of threadlines that led into the past.

Although those rumours are probably untrue, she reflected.  It would break causality into rubble.

She keyed her console, sounding the alert.  The mission was no longer routine.  The gravity wave - the folded gravity wave - should not have been there.  The threadline had been located and charted thousands of years ago, back when her distant ancestors were only starting to grasp the concept of fire.  And that meant ... she frowned as the rest of her crew scrambled to their stations, readying themselves for anything.  If the last survey mission had missed a gravity fold, what else had they missed?  She had the sickening feeling she was about to find out.

“Deploy two recon drones,” she ordered.  “One to the edge of the threadline, one beyond.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Ensign Hinkson looked up.  “Captain, I just compared our sensor logs to the files from the shipping consortiums,” he said.  “There’s no mention of a shift in the gravitational topography, and none of the freighters reported encountering the wave.”

“Noted.”  Ashleigh hid her amusement with an effort.  If any of the freighters had reported the wave, it would have been reflected in her orders.  But the ensign was right to check, even if the last set of updates were dangerously outdated.  The big consortiums were scrupulous about reporting any navigational issues to the interstellar governments, but not all of them regarded humanity as an interstellar power.  “Draw up the last records and compare them to our current sensor readings.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Ashleigh smiled, then frowned as the drones started to report back.  The edge of the threadline was shifting ... no, closing.  It was still huge - she could fly much of the Solar Navy through the threadline and have room for a few hundred alien ships - and the movement was so slight it was barely noticeable, but it was there.  She keyed her console, checking the threadline’s internal topography.  It looked as if the walls were closing in.  There was no danger - not yet, perhaps not ever - but she couldn’t help feeling a twinge of claustrophobia.  She’d taken her ship down threadlines that had been alarmingly thin, to the point only one ship could pass at a time, and yet ... this threadline was meant to be stable.  Why was it shifting?

“Captain, Drone One is passing beyond the edge now,” Lieutenant Ellis reported.  “The signal link is becoming increasingly distorted.”

“Stay with it, as best as you can,” Ashleigh ordered.  Multispace played merry hell with communications, too.  It wasn’t uncommon for ships to pick up transmissions that had been sent hundreds of years ago, while completely missing signals from a ship that was right next to them.  “And ...”

Another shudder ran through the ship.  “Report!”

“The gravity wave twisted again,” Lieutenant Ellis said.  “I think ...”

He broke off.  “Captain, we just lost the drone.”

Ashleigh frowned at his back.  “Was the drone destroyed?  Or did we just lose contact?”

“Uncertain,” Lieutenant Ellis admitted.  “There was no terminal signal, but the drone might have been destroyed too quickly to send one.”

Ashleigh forced herself to think.  The drones weren’t designed for rough conditions.  A lone gravity fluctuation might have destroyed the drone or simply tossed it light-years beyond human understanding.  Her ship was designed to handle conditions that would tear a drone to pieces without even noticing ... and yet, she was reluctant to cross the edge and press into the tangled reaches beyond.  She needed to know what was on the far side and yet ... there were limits to how much she dared risk.

And if I don’t find out now, she thought, they’ll just have to send another ship back to do the job we should have done.

“Communications, burst transmission to the nearest relay posts,” she ordered.  The Galactics should relay the messages back to Earth if interstellar law and treaties still meant anything.  Everyone had an interest in maintaining navigational charts, even races and powers that were historically enemies.  “Helm, prepare to take us across the edge.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Ashleigh braced herself as the starship altered course.  The Magellan was designed for probing the unexplored and uncharted sections of multispace and yet ... it was hard not to feel as though she was making a mistake.  But what choice did she have?  If the threadline was shifting, or closing, they needed to know why.  They needed to know if the other threadlines in the sector were threatened.  They needed to know ... her lips thinned as the edge came closer, Magellan girding her loins for a plunge into the unknown.  If they knew ... what could they do about it?  The Alphans were the most advanced race in the known universe and even they couldn’t manipulate multispace.  There was nothing they could do, if the threadline closed, beyond rerouting traffic and hoping for the best.

“Captain, we will cross the edge in ten seconds,” Lieutenant Adams said.  “Nine ... eight ...”

Magellan shuddered, again and again.  That wasn’t normal, certainly not in a well-charted threadline.  Ashleigh made a mental note to file a complaint about whoever had conducted the last survey as the shuddering grew worse, the ship’s drive fields struggling to compensate.  No wonder the first drone had probably been destroyed.  It was a minor miracle the second was still alive and broadcasting.  But then, it hadn’t tried to go beyond the edge.

She gritted her teeth as a low crash echoed through the hull.  It was her imagination, at least in part, and yet ... she promised herself that, if she ever got back home, she’d never make fun of anyone who dreaded multispace again.  They’d just crashed into the unknown and ... she snapped orders, directing the crew to reboot the sensors as the display fuzzed and blanked.  She hadn’t seen anything like it since the war, since the enemy had tried to defeat a human flotilla by blanketing it with distortion and jamming pulses.  It hadn’t worked as well as the Lupines had hoped - Alphan sensors were still a cut above everyone else’s - but it had given them a chance to get into firing range.  She couldn’t help tensing.  If that happened again ... 

The display updated.  Ashleigh sucked in her breath as she saw the multispace beyond the walls.  It was a storm, a raging typhoon of energy sweeping towards her with all the inevitability of an asteroid falling into a gravity well.  She felt silence fall like a physical blow, her crew staring in horror.  They knew how dangerous space could be and yet ... they’d never seen anything so powerful and dangerous outside training simulations.  The storm was so vast that ... she swallowed hard, remembering stories from deep space explorers who had gone beyond the rim.  She’d thought they’d been pulling her leg, as if she was a credulous primitive who’d thought her world was flat before a more advanced race arrived to show them they were wrong.  She knew, now, they’d been telling the truth.

“Reverse course,” she snapped.  The sensors struggled to cope with the torrent of energy pouring towards them, but ... she cursed under her breath.  They couldn’t enter such a storm and live.  “Get us back into the threadline!”

“Aye, Captain.”

Ashleigh cursed under her breath as the shaking intensified, the drives keening loudly as they struggled to get them back to safely.  The gravity topography was growing steeper, as if they’d tried to fly through a planet’s atmosphere only to discover, too late, that they’d gone too far into the gravity well and doomed themselves.  She’d made a serious mistake.  She knew she’d had no choice, but ... the ship shook one final time, then fell quiet.  They’d made it back to the threadline.  Barely.

Her nostrils twitched.  Someone had wet themselves.  She pretended not to notice.  They’d trained extensively for everything from transient threadlines to hostile aliens, but there were limits as to how far they could go in training simulators.  They were never real.  How could they be?

“Captain.”  Lieutenant Ellis sounded shaken.  “If my readings are correct, the entire sector is caught in the storm.”

Ashleigh stared at the sensor logs, shaking her head.  The storm was immense, beyond her ability to comprehend.  No wonder the threadlines were shrinking.  The more she looked at the records, the more she thought it was just a matter of time before the threadlines snapped.  Perhaps they’d reform, eventually ... no, newer ones would take their place.  She keyed the console, bringing up the starchart.  It would take months, if not years, for the storm to disperse, then decades for the new threadlines to be charted and cleared for use.  Until then ... starships would have to take the long way around if they didn’t want to risk the storm.  They’d have no choice.  Magellan was designed for harsh environments, to go boldly into regions of multispace that would daunt a warcruiser, but even Magellan couldn’t fly through a storm.  There were better ways to commit suicide.  

Lieutenant Ellis was still talking, babbling speculations on what might have caused the storm.  The sensor records would fuel genuinely original science - the human race, like everyone else, wanted to know how to travel multispace without the crossroads - and yet, right now, it didn’t matter.  Ashleigh understood his enthusiasm, and she appreciated the story was going to have everyone buying her crew drinks, but she understood what it meant.  If they had to take an extra few weeks, if not months, to reach Alphan Prime ... what would it do to interstellar trade?  

Hell, she reflected.  If the storm gets worse, we may not even be able to punch a message through to the other side.

She leaned back in her chair.  “Helm, set course for Ballade,” she ordered.  She’d sent a message earlier, but it was hard to be sure it had reached its destination.  They had to go in person.  “Best possible speed.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Chapter Two

PDC Lincoln, Earth

It was a cold, clear day.

First Speaker Abraham Douglas, President of Earth and the Solar Government, stood behind a one-way forcefield on the stadium’s podium and tried not to stare too openly at the mountain of death and destruction on the site of the former Washington, DC.  He’d seen the plans, of course, and he’d told himself he understood the sheer immensity of the Planetary Defence Centre, but he hadn’t grasped, not emotionally, just how big it actually was.  It was a brooding man-made mountain, bristling with weapons capable of engaging starships in high orbit or intercepting projectiles plunging to the planetary surface.  It was difficult to realise it was tiny, compared to the planet itself, or that it could only engage targets within sensor range.  He’d read all the briefing notes, all the proposals put together and carefully evaluated before they broke the ground, and yet ...

He lowered his gaze, composing himself.  The crowd had been growing since daybreak, since the gates were opened to allow them to enter the stadium.  Humans and aliens, civilians and military personnel and - he was sure - a handful of diplomatic officials who were de facto spies.  It went against the grain to allow them anywhere near the PDC, although there was nothing remotely classified within eyesight.  The Galactics had built PDCs that predated the pyramids.  They could probably make a very good guess at the PDC’s capabilities just by looking at it.

Which is something of the point, he reminded himself.  We want them to understand we will not be an easy target, if they decide to come knocking.

He kept his face under tight control.  He’d spent most of his life working for greater autonomy within the empire, perhaps even a degree of partnership with humanity’s alien masters, and it seemed a sick joke - sometimes - that they’d just let humanity go.  Abraham could see the logic, understand their thinking ... and yet, there were times he wished the Alphans had pushed for a more gradual transition to independence.  Independence had been followed, with terrifying speed, by the Vultek War, a grim reminder that humanity - naked and alone - was now exposed to the more predatory races along the edge of civilised space.  It had been five years and yet the scars still lingered.  He knew, even if the gathering crowd didn’t, how close humanity had come to losing its independence within months of gaining it.  It was just a matter of time, he’d been cautioned, before someone more dangerous came calling.  There were races out there that intended to supplant the Alphans and didn’t feel inclined to take no for an answer.

The crowd kept growing, hundreds of thousands of humans and aliens readying themselves for him.  Abraham’s eyes swept the crowd, noting the reporters live-streaming the event to an audience numbered in the billions.  His aides had assured him that nearly half of the human race would be watching, something that bothered him.  If there was a screw-up in front of the reporters ... he shook his head, mentally reviewing his speech.  Nothing would go wrong.  They’d done everything in their power to check and recheck everything before he’d allowed his staff to plan the ceremony.  Hell, for all he’d been given a button to press, the real work had been done weeks ago.  He honestly wasn’t sure if the button did anything.  

Rachael Grant, his aide, caught his eye.  “Mr. Speaker, the ceremony will begin in ten minutes.”

Abraham nodded, curtly, and glanced down to check his appearance one final time.  The formal robes the Alphans had mandated had been replaced, thanks to a committee he’d handpicked to ensure the stodgier members of his political alliance had a chance to feel they were doing something important while - in reality - being sidelined.  They’d looked to the past and decided human politicians should wear simple suits and ties, outfits so uncomfortable that Abraham was tempted to insist that they bring back the robes.  It had taken some expert tailoring to turn the suit into something he could wear, for more than an hour or two, and he still wasn’t quite used to the tie.  He wondered, idly, if someone on the committee had realised they’d been sidelined after all.  Perhaps it was just a petty form of revenge.

Or perhaps they studied the records without thinking about what they meant, he reflected, wryly.  It isn’t as if anyone alive lived in a world without aliens.

His lips quirked, although it wasn’t funny.  The last five years had been dominated by people who wanted to look to the past, to resurrect some of the cultural traditions that had been suppressed or simply allowed to fall into disuse, or people who wanted to look to the future and let the past remain firmly buried.  Abraham wasn’t sure what to make of it.  Some old traditions had been worthwhile - pre-invasion music, art, literature - but others should have been abandoned long ago.  Nationalism, gender roles, even religion ... they threatened to get out of hand, if they were allowed to spread too far.  Abraham had wondered, once, how the pre-invasion governments had coped.  He’d discovered, when he’d asked, that they often hadn’t.

We took our cues from the Alphans for so long we’ve lost much of our original culture, he mused, sourly.  And we don’t know how to resurrect it.

“It’s time,” Rachael said.  She stepped back, into the shadows.  “Break a leg.”

Abraham composed himself as the forcefield snapped out of existence.  The crowd saw him and roared its approval.  Abraham waited, clasping his hands behind his back as his eyes wandered over the crowd.  It was a very mixed group, as he’d thought; he grimaced inwardly as he saw a scuffle between protestors from two different political factions.  The police moved in to separate them, rushing the protestors out of the stadium before they started something they couldn’t finish.  Abraham kept his face under tight control, all too aware the crowd’s approval could easily turn to hate.  The days in which he’d been able to blame everything on the Alphans were long gone.  Humanity was independent, as independent as a race could be in a universe bursting with powerful and often hostile races.  The buck stopped with him.

He raised his hands.  The racket dimmed, suppressed by the stadium’s quietening fields.  Abraham felt a twinge of fear.  His words would be carried right across the stadium and beyond, to listening ears hundreds of light years from Earth.  How many of them would draw the right lessons, he wondered; how many of them would be singularly unimpressed?  His eyes sought out the alien ambassadors, kept well clear of the rowdy crowd.  He wished, not for the first time, that he’d been able to insist they stay well clear of the ceremony.  A single incident would be enough to start a war.

“Five years ago, we gained our independence,” he started.  The crowd roared so loudly it could be heard even through the quietening fields.  Abraham waited, then continued.  “Since then, we have lived in a universe where we have no protectors, no defenders, but ourselves.  And we have learnt, the hard way, that there are races out there who will not hesitate to take advantage of any hint of weakness.”

The crowd roared, once again.  Abraham grimaced.  The Alphans had done their best to establish a system of interstellar law and good conduct, but the blunt truth - as his military advisors had pointed out time and time again - was that the system was only as good as its enforcement, and enforcement had been sadly lacking even before humanity had been granted its independence.  It was hard to be sure - the interstellar communications network hadn’t been known as the net of a trillion lies for nothing - but there were very definite hints of independent worlds being invaded, or simply scorched clean of life.  The laws were no longer being enforced.  And even if they were ...

Abraham felt his expression darken.  It was a dog-eat-dog universe.  The Galactics had no obligation to respect the younger and more primitive races, let alone leave them to develop in peace.  Really, humanity had been lucky.  The Alphans had established themselves as the planet’s masters very quickly, and crushed anyone who dared resist, but they hadn’t enslaved the human race or strip-mined the planet for rare materials.  There were races that had been a good deal less fortunate.  Abraham knew there were roamers who’d been kicked off their homeworlds and ordered to get lost, left to wander the galaxy without hope of finding safety and salvation.  There were entire races that were nothing more than slaves.  And now the Alphans were gone, some of the Galactics were looking at humanity with hungry eyes.

He spoke, quietly but firmly.  “If you want peace - and we do - we must prepare for war.  We must make it clear, to friends and enemies alike, that we will do whatever we must to ensure the human race remains in control of its destiny.  We will spend millions for defence, but not one credit for tribute.   Lincoln is more than just a new planetary defence centre.  It is a sign of our willingness to work to defend ourselves.”

The crowd roared, once again.  Abraham nodded to himself.  The audience didn’t know he’d cribbed his words from a far older source and wouldn’t have cared if they had.  Millions for defence, not one credit for tribute had been an excellent slogan for his re-election campaign and he’d used it ruthlessly.  It helped, he supposed, that the realists in government - even the ones on the other side - were all too aware that a disunited humanity was a weak and vulnerable humanity, a target for anyone with bad intentions.  They might challenge him on domestic issues - and they had - but foreign affairs were bipartisan.  There was no choice.

“We all want peace,” he continued.  “And to have peace, we must be strong.  We must be ready and able to defend ourselves.  We - not anyone else - must control the space around our worlds.  We must be able to defend ourselves and project power, to keep the border secure and ensure our interests are respected beyond it.  If we fail to show that we can and will fight, we will lose.”

Abraham took a breath.  “It is easy to say we should put our trust in galactic institutions.  It is easy to rely on the old order, to pretend it can handle any problems we might face.  But we cannot - we dare not - put our fate in others’ hands.  Galactic order is shifting, changing.  It may even break down completely.  And we must be ready.”

He stepped forward and placed his hand on the button.  “Today, we take another step towards security,” he said.  “And we look forward to the day when we are finally safe from galactic predators.”

The button clicked.  The PDC lit up, forcefields shimmering to life.  It was difficult, if not impossible, to mount a forcefield generator on a starship - even the Alphans hadn’t managed to overcome the technical problems - but a PDC could protect itself from orbital bombardment while engaging enemy ships with ground-based weapons.  Abraham wondered, idly, how the Alphan Invasion would have gone if Earth had a network of PDCs in place to greet the invading starships.  It would have been very different, he was sure.  The Alphans would have treated humanity with a little more respect if humanity had controlled its own high orbitals.

His stomach clenched.  Humanity really had been lucky.  He didn’t understand how and why his ancestors had turned their backs on the universe.  There were races out there that had gotten to their moons within a decade of figuring out how to launch rockets, even reached the stars by the end of the first century.  The Alphans hadn’t known what to make of it.  They had never been sure if humanity could be counted as a spacefaring race, and therefore deserving of some respect, or merely considered nothing more than yet another primitive race grubbing in the mud, ready to be enlightened - and exploited - by a far more advanced race.  Abraham knew, all too well, just how bad things could have been.  Even now, the major races regarded humanity with a mixture of disdain and greed.  They didn’t see the human race as players in their own right.  

He looked at the crowd and wondered, numbly, how many of them truly understood how fragile humanity’s position was.  They probably didn’t.  They looked at the Vultek War, at the victory that had been snatched from humanity at the last moment, and thought the human race could do anything.  Abraham knew better.  The Vulteks had been blinded by their preconceptions and, his intelligence staff suspected, encouraged to act quickly by their patrons.  A more powerful race, with a better grasp of its own technology and space to trade for time, would be a more serious threat.  Abraham was all too aware that Earth didn’t even begin to have the mobile firepower to patrol the inner worlds, let alone the space ceded to humanity in the wake of the war.  It was turning into a lawless nightmare that was sure to draw in the other powers.

And once they’re in, he reflected as he stepped off the podium, it will be very hard to get them out again.

***

Ambassador Yasuke, former Viceroy of Earth, would never admit it openly, but he’d always been very fond of humanity.  Perhaps too fond.  He was aware, from his contacts back home, that there were people who wondered if he’d gone native, in the four decades he’d spent on Earth.  The thought was absurd - he was loyal to his people, the Alphans - but he had to admit, at least to himself, that he cared more for humanity than he should.  It wasn’t easy to serve as the de facto ruler of the planet if one cared, if one saw one’s subjects as ... not equals, never equals, but people in their own right.  Yasuke’s predecessors had ordered everything from quiet purges to open suppression, pruning the human race coldly and dispassionately for its own good.  He wasn’t sure he could have done their deeds himself.  It was easier to order mass slaughter when you were dealing with numbers, unaware there were real people behind the figures.  It was so much easier to tell yourself it was all for their own good ...

And the good of the empire, of course, Yasuke reminded himself, dryly.  We did very well for ourselves by doing good.

He watched, dispassionately, as the First Speaker gave way to a handful of other speakers, all of whom seemed to be repeating the same speech over and over.  Humanity was free.  Humanity would remain free.  Humanity would sooner beggar itself than submit to alien domination once again.  Yasuke didn’t blame the humans for wanting to make it clear they would fight - the Lupine Wars might have been avoided if the Alphans had made it clear they had the will to fight and keep fighting, even after the first battles had gone so badly - but he couldn’t help fearing that the humans were courting disaster.  There were several races vying for galactic supremacy.  None of them wanted another competitor.  And if they wanted, they could crush the humans in a short, sharp campaign.

The humans are tough, he thought.  It had been humans who’d saved the Alphans from defeat, back in the war.  They’d fought like demons, dying in droves to give the Alphans a chance to collect themselves and counterattack.  They’ll make whoever attacks them pay for their crimes.

He kept his thoughts to himself as the ceremony came to an end with a flyover.  The human pilots were daredevils - their starfighters might be primitive, but their pilots knew how to push them right to the limits - and yet, it seemed to him as though they were risking their lives on one throw of the dice.  It was something that attracted and repelled him in equal measure, a zest for life that his own race had lost centuries ago.  They’d built an empire and then ... and then what?  They’d won the war, yet - in a sense - they’d lost.  There was no enthusiasm for rebuilding the fleet, let alone reclaiming their rightful place as the masters of the universe.

It isn’t our rightful place, Yasuke thought, morbidly.  He couldn’t allow himself any illusions.  His ancestors had built an empire by conquering every world within reach and pressing a dozen intelligent - if primitive - races into servitude.  The universe had never mandated they were its masters.  And there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to keep it.

He summoned his flyer as the police escorted him and the others out of the stadium.  He’d go back to the embassy and report on the new PDC, then ... then what?  He was out of favour back home.  That wouldn’t change, not in a hurry.  Too many of his peers saw him as a traitor, someone who’d insisted they grant humanity’s independence, rather than fighting a brutal war that would have destroyed all hope of a better future even if they won.  He’d hoped Earth would remain close to its former masters, but ...

We’re giving up too much, he thought.  There was no way to avoid the simple fact the galaxy believed his people no longer had the ability, let alone the will, to dominate their explored universe.  They might even be right.  There was no enthusiasm for enforcing galactic law any longer.  And who is going to take our place?

Chapter Three

Solar City, Earth

“It could have gone worse,” First Speaker Abraham Douglas said, as he stepped into his private office.  “Let’s hope they were actually watching.”

“They were watching,” Rachael said, calmly.  “The only question is how seriously they’ll take it.”

Abraham nodded and took his chair, looking down at the desk.  It was astonishing just how much paperwork demanded his attention, even though most of it - he was fairly sure – could’ve been handled by his subordinates.  There was a very real risk of being overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of running an interstellar power, of finding himself trapped in micromanagement instead of setting policy and letting his subordinates turn it into reality.  It had been five years and yet he still hadn’t gotten used to it.  He rather suspected the day he thought he was used to it was the day he should retire.  The government couldn’t afford to be dominated by one party indefinitely.  That would be asking for trouble.

Rachael passed him a cup of coffee, then stood in front of the desk.  “Preliminary data suggests half the planetary population watched the ceremony, either live or on repeat.  Much commentary on the datanet is positive, save for people who see the PDC as needlessly provocative and people who think we should have invested in starships instead.  There’s no hint of political opposition, not yet ...”

“It’ll come,” Abraham predicted.  “And we’ll have to think of a way to handle it without causing more trouble.”

He shook his head.  He hadn’t realised - no one had - how deeply Earth was integrated into the Alphan Empire until the Alphans had pulled out, leaving humanity with an embarrassment of riches in some areas and desperate deprivation in others.  The government had tried to spend its way out of the crisis only to discover it didn’t have the cash on hand to do more than slow the crash, and promises of loans from galactic banks came with nasty strings attached.  They’d been lucky, the cynical part of his mind noted, that the Vulteks had attacked so quickly.  The aliens had become ready-made scapegoats for an economic recession that, in hindsight, had been inevitable.  Even now, five years later, humanity was still trying to recover from the economic slump.  It would be a long time before the human race could face the galactic superpowers as equals.

And building up a war fleet really would be seen as provocative, he thought.  The peaceniks might moan and whine about the PDCs - it still surprised him they’d managed to get anyone into government - but the PDCs were immobile.  They couldn’t threaten anyone who stayed well clear of the high orbitals.  A fleet, on the other hand, might tip the balance of power.  It was all too likely to attract unfriendly attention from hostile powers.  Not that we wouldn’t, if we could.

Rachael cleared her throat.  “Do you want the full report?”

“No, thank you,” Abraham said.  He’d have to read it, sooner or later, just to determine what had worked and what hadn’t, but ... he shook his head.  “How did the ambassadors react?”

“We’re unsure,” Rachael said.  “A couple seemed very interested, but otherwise ... we don’t know.  So far, they haven’t transmitted any reports home ... as far as we know, at least.  Our old boss went straight back to his embassy and hasn’t been seen since.”

Abraham nodded, curtly.  It wasn’t easy to place assets within an embassy.  The Galactics had been spying on each other for thousands of years and their surveillance and counter-surveillance gear was terrifyingly advanced.  In hindsight, it was all too easy to see why none of the human revolts had ever come close to driving the aliens off the planet.  They hadn’t even begun to comprehend just how deeply they’d been penetrated, even before the fighting had begun.  And now ... the intelligence staff were working on turning a handful of embassy workers, he’d been assured, but it was slow going.  The human race simply didn’t have much to offer alien dissidents.

“We’ll see,” he said.  The thought mocked him.  They had to look strong.  It was the only way to be sure the defences wouldn’t be tested.  “Do you anticipate any problems with the funding bill?”

“Not as yet,” Rachael said.  “The opposition has been surprisingly muted.  That may change, if the peace lingers, but ...”

She shrugged, expressively.  Abraham nodded in understanding.  The longer the human race remained at peace, the more people who’d believe peace was the natural state of affairs.  He knew better.  The moment an interstellar power thought it could attack Earth and get away with it, it would.  There were just too many potential enemies out there, from scavenger races who wanted a home for themselves to multisystem empires intent on becoming the next hegemonic power.  Abraham wanted that for humanity, but he knew it was a pipe dream.  It would be hundreds of years before they could match the Galactics, let alone surpass them.

Rachael keyed her datapad.  “Sir, Ambassador Nancy Middleton is requesting a meeting.”

“And it is probably urgent,” Abraham said.  “She wouldn’t have asked to speak to me if it wasn’t.”

The thought was weirdly amusing.  Nancy Middleton had been his rival, back when Earth had been part of the Alphan Empire and they’d been scrabbling for scraps of power from their master’s table.  They were not friends, but ... in the wake of independence, they’d learnt to work together.  They hadn’t had a choice.  She was a good roving ambassador, someone who could speak to potential allies - and be thrown under the shuttle and disavowed, if necessary.  

He glanced at his schedule, then shrugged.  “How quickly can she get here?”

“She’s in the foreign office,” Rachael said.  “She can be here in ten minutes.”

“Then invite her,” Abraham said.  “I’ll wait.”

He turned his attention to the datapad as Rachael hurried away, mentally cataloguing the messages and sorting out what needed immediate attention.  It had been five years and yet there was still an oddly ramshackle air to his government, as if it hadn’t been designed to govern.  His lips thinned in irritation.  There was no if about it.  The Speakers hadn’t been intended to wield power.  Perhaps, if independence hadn’t come so quickly, they could have grown into their role, while the government itself evolved into something that worked.  As it was ... he worried, sometimes, about just what would happen when he left office.  The old struggle between the Empire Loyalists and the Humanity League was over.  It was just a matter of time, he feared, before the League split or turned into a pustule on mankind’s collective buttocks.

I suppose some people would say we’ve already reached that point, he thought, as the door opened again.  And they might be right.

He stood to greet Nancy Middleton, then motioned her to the sofa.  There was no point in rubbing her face in the fact he’d defeated her in the first true election, or that he’d won the second without any real contest.  She might have been his rival, but they weren’t real enemies.  He didn’t hate her.  He didn’t think she hated him.  If he had, he would never have offered her a post in government.

“It’s good to see you again,” he said.  It wasn’t really a lie.  “I hope you had time to attend the ceremony.”

“I noticed you stole a bunch of lines from pre-conquest speakers,” Nancy said, mischievously.  “Doesn’t your speechwriter have an original bone in his body?”

“It’s important to look to the past, as we march to the future,” Abraham said.  “Where else can we see humans governing themselves?”

Nancy nodded, conceding the point.  Humans had spread through most of explored space and beyond - there were millions of humans still working in the Alphan Empire - but few of them had any real power.  Earth and the surrounding human-majority worlds were the only places humans ruled themselves.  Elsewhere, humans were either one of many races living in uneasy harmony or the subjects of alien rulers.  Five years ago, even Earth hadn’t been ruled by the human race.  The Speakers had known they were barely tolerated by the Alphans.  Now ...

“I wasn’t sure I’d be back in time for the ceremony,” Nancy said.  “The interstellar slowdown is affecting everyone.”

Abraham nodded, curtly.  He’d sent Nancy on a mission that had never been openly acknowledged, not outside the inner council.  Sending her had been a calculated risk and yet ... the fact she wasn’t a member of his inner councils could be construed as an insult.  The Galactics might easily take offense, if they found out.  They might even refuse to accept the human sacrifice and demand something more, perhaps something the human race couldn’t afford to give.  But there’d been no choice.  The only alternative was sitting and waiting to be hit.

“That’s unfortunate,” he said.  “How did your mission go?”

Nancy scowled.  She wasn’t used to secrecy.  She’d been reluctant to refrain from writing reports, let alone send them home.  In theory, diplomatic vessels were inviolate and diplomatic messages were supposed to remain unread.  In practice, Abraham suspected the messages, at least, would be intercepted and decrypted almost as soon as they were sent.  The only security lay in total silence, beyond a handful of messages that were meaningless to anyone who lacked the cultural context.  And even that was doubtful.  The Galactics had had five hundred years to study the human race.

“I spoke to five governments, off the record,” Nancy said.  “Four of them were interested, but completely non-committal.  The fifth ordered me to leave the planet immediately.  I was surprised I wasn’t recalled at once when word reached Earth.”

“The government in question didn’t make a fuss,” Abraham said, wryly.  That had been a relief.  It would have raised questions he didn’t want to have to answer, if the scandal became public.  “They must have repented almost as soon as they ordered you out.”

Nancy nodded.  “Practically speaking, I think the four remaining governments would be interested, but they don’t think we have much to offer.  If we had three in our pocket, the fourth would join up ... of course, they all feel that way.  There’s some room for at least trying to put together a joint declaration, but they won’t commit themselves unless they move as a group and they can’t do that unless they commit themselves.”

“Yeah.”  Abraham sighed.  The plan had been relatively simple.  Make contact with the lesser powers near Earth and convince them to join an alliance, one designed to make life difficult for the superpowers if they decided to push matters.  But the devil, as always, was in the details.  The lesser powers needed to get organised as a group, which ran the risk of drawing attention.  “Do you think they’ll sell out for the best terms they can get?”

“It’s possible,” Nancy said.  “Realistically, the Alphans were genuinely ... respectful ... of races that maintained a degree of control over their home systems.  They may never have seen them as equals, but they didn’t see them as slaves either.  They ... as long as the Alphans dictated how the galaxy worked, the other superpowers didn’t try to put pressure on the lesser powers.  Now ... everything’s changed.  The Alphans are no longer enforcing the rules.”

Abraham shivered.  It wasn’t news, but ... hearing it from a woman who’d been a loyal servant to their alien masters chilled him.  “And then ... what?”

“Imagine a tiger in a zoo, pacing behind the bars,” Nancy said.  “The poor beast paces the bars, wanting out; it growls and snarls at the nasty little human children on the far side of the cage.  But it cannot break the bars.  And then ... the bars just vanish.  For a while, the tiger will keep pacing out of habit.  It won’t notice the bars are gone.”

She paused, dramatically.  “And then, when it does notice, it finds that it is free to do whatever it likes.”

“Like eating the children,” Abraham said.

“Quite.”  Nancy met his eyes, evenly.  “There’s a growing sense in the greater galaxy that the old order is dead.  Some of the superpowers want to try to maintain it, but none of them have the power and prestige of the Alphans.  They are certainly not immune to consequences if they try to enforce the laws - the former laws.  Others just want to secure their own positions and gird their loins for interstellar war.  Everyone is building up their militaries as far as they can.  It’s just a matter of time before someone does something stupid and shooting breaks out.”

“I know.”  Abraham gritted his teeth.  “And the Alphans themselves?”

“I had no direct contact with them, as per your orders,” Nancy said, primly.  “But from what I’ve heard, indirectly, they’re pulling back their horns.  The warcruisers that used to patrol major shipping routes are gone.  The bases they maintained along the crossroads are being shut down.  I’ve even heard a suggestion they’re abandoning a handful of worlds on the grounds they’re no longer worth the effort of maintenance.  I don’t know how seriously to take any of it, but ... the blunt truth is that the Alphans are stepping back from their former role.”

Abraham heard the betrayal in her voice and winced.  Nancy had been a loyal servant, perhaps a little too loyal.  She hadn’t been a traitor, neither to her own race nor her masters.  And yet, she’d been betrayed.  The Empire Loyalists were still fragmenting, unsure if they should make their peace with independence or try to emigrate to the alien homeworlds.  The Alphans themselves didn’t seem to care.  They hadn’t even offered to take the loyalists away from Earth.  They’d just ... left.

Perhaps it would have been better for us if we’d fought for our independence, he mused, sourly.  But the devastation would have been beyond repair even if we won.

“And so we are alone,” he said.  “Who do you think it’ll be?”

“I don’t know,” Nancy said.  “We’re not exactly a soft target.  On the other hand” - her lips thinned, noticeably - “the superpowers won’t want to pick on their peers or stamp on a primitive world.  There’s nothing impressive about that.  My guess is that it will be either the Pashtali or the N’Gann.”

“The Pashtali have already clashed with us,” Abraham said.

“Not directly,” Nancy said.  She frowned.  “They may fear the Alphans would react badly if the Pashtali took control of our stars.  We’re not that far from the core worlds.  That might be all that kept them from invading five years ago.  Now ...”

She grimaced.  “There’s already a rumour the Pashtali wiped out a primitive race on the far side of the empire, just so they could settle the world themselves.”

Abraham tried to keep his face impassive.  He was no racist xenophobe - humans had grown used to alien life forms hundreds of years ago - and yet, he still found it hard to think of the Pashtali without shivering.  They were giant spider-like creatures, so utterly inhuman it was hard to believe the two races had anything in common.  They generally kept to themselves, rarely making contact with anyone unless they wanted something.  And yet, he reminded himself, they’d backed the Vulteks.  They’d certainly been able to get the primitive race to follow orders.

Which couldn’t have been that hard, Abraham reflected.  He’d read the xenospecialist reports very carefully.  The Vulteks could be relied upon to do as they were told, as long as they thought their patrons were their superiors.

He stared down at the desk.  Most known races were humanoid.  The Pashtali were not.  If there was any race that could and would wipe out another just to get their world for themselves ... he told himself it wasn’t proof of anything.  The rumour might be nothing more than bullshit.  It wouldn’t be the first time a rumour had spread so far it had been accepted as fact hundreds of light years away.  And besides, it wasn’t as if humanity and the rest of the known races were innocent.  They’d all committed crimes against themselves, if not their fellow sentients.

“We’ll keep making preparations,” he said.  “And I look forward to reading your reports.”

Nancy nodded.  “I’ll put them together this evening,” she said.  “I didn’t keep notes, as per orders, but my memory is good.  I’ll let you take the blame for circumventing the rules on maintaining proper records.”

“Of course,” Abraham said, dryly.  The Alphans had been determined to record everything, from shipping manifests to military and shipping logs.  He sometimes wondered if their empire had been doomed to stagnate, even without the wars.  “We dared not risk letting anyone get a sniff of your mission.”

“No,” Nancy agreed.  She met his eyes, evenly.  “Do you think we made a mistake?”

We, Abraham thought, wryly.

He did her the honour of seriously considering the question.  The Alphans hadn’t been bad masters ... but they’d been masters.  They’d ruled.  They’d taken whatever they wanted and left the scraps for their human servants.  And he’d been sure, back then, that humanity deserved to be so much more.  And yet ... there was no denying that the Alphans had protected humanity.  The galaxy was a much less stable place without them.

Be careful what you wish for, his thoughts pointed out.  You might get it.

“I think we did the best thing we could, based on what we knew at the time,” he said.  It was true enough, although - in hindsight - the warning signs had been clear to those willing to look beyond their preconceptions and see them for what they were.  “If we’d known other things, we might have done things differently.”

He shrugged and stood.  “We are on our own,” he added, as she joined him.  “And to think otherwise, or even to contemplate how things might be different, is nothing more than wishful thinking and wasted time.”

Chapter Four

Earth Defence Force One, Earth Orbit

“You wanted to see me, sir?”

First Admiral Adam Glass looked up as Captain Naomi Yagami was shown into his office, the younger woman snapping to attention as the hatch closed behind her.  She’d aged in the two years since they’d last met, when he’d been on an inspection tour of the border defences; he knew, even if she didn’t, that it was only a matter of time until she was promoted to flag rank and put behind a desk.  The Solar Navy was short on officers who’d seen the elephant and knew how to be diplomatic, particularly when dealing with arrogant alien representatives.  Naomi had served under an Alphan Captain.  There were few races in the known galaxy that matched the Alphans for arrogance and none that surpassed them.

“I did,” Adam said.  “Please.  Stand at ease.”

He studied the younger woman as she relaxed, slightly.  She’d handled herself well in the Earth Defence Force, before it had become the Solar Navy.  She’d kept her crew from launching a mutiny at the worst possible moment, then taken command of her own ship and served with distinction in the war.  Really, he reflected, she should have been kicked upstairs long ago.  She would make a good successor for him, when he was finally allowed to retire.  He was mildly surprised that the government hadn’t arranged for his retirement a long time ago.

Although it might send completely the wrong message, he mused.  If they retire me, what will they do to the others who once served the Alphans loyally?

He leaned back in his chair.  “Did you have a good time at the academy?”

“It was ... interesting,” Naomi said.  She was competent at concealing her feelings, but it was clear she hadn’t enjoyed it.  Adam didn’t blame her.  “The next generation of serving officers are in good hands.”

Adam quirked an eyebrow.  “Do you have any thoughts on the quality of the training program?”

“I would urge that we ensure all cadets spent some time on starships before being accepted for officer training,” Naomi said.  “Frankly, sir, I would urge that we only accept mustangs.  It is far too easy to lose track of what’s important without real experience.”

“I know.”  Adam grimaced.  He hadn’t expected to rise as high as he had, even before independence.  “But at least we have a solid base for expansion.”

Naomi nodded, holding herself steady.  Adam understood.  She knew she hadn’t been called to discuss the training program.  A summons from the First Admiral meant she was about to be promoted or she was in deep shit, and she knew she hadn’t done anything that would earn her a bollocking from the First Admiral himself.  Or-  Adam smiled, inwardly - perhaps she was about to be both promoted and dumped into the shit.  He honestly wasn’t sure what she’d make of her new orders.  He just knew she’d accomplish her mission or die trying.

He keyed his console, displaying a starchart.  Humanity’s stars were in green, surrounded by golden, yellow and red lights.  The occupied zone that had been ceded to humanity, in the wake of the war, pulsed a steady grey.  Adam had a private theory - and he knew the First Speaker shared it - that the Pashtali intended the occupied zone to drain humanity’s resources.  If that was the case, it had been successful.  The Solar Navy didn’t have the numbers to patrol the entire zone without drawing down its forces everywhere else.

But not patrolling the zone leaves us open to charges of condoning everything that happens within it, he thought, tightly.  And someone could use that as an excuse to invade.

“There have been a series of pirate attacks, possibly backed by hostile powers, on both starships and planets within the occupied zone,” he said, by way of introduction.  “A number of freighters - at least forty, both human and alien - have been lost, along with two warships.  I don’t think I need to tell you, Captain, what this might mean for us.”

“No, sir.”

Adam nodded.  “Right now, we are under immense diplomatic pressure to do something about the growing lawlessness,” he said.  “There are suggestions that other powers will start sending ships to protect their interests, if we can’t or won’t do it for them.  If they start exercising effective control over the sector, as they will if they’re the ones providing a degree of law and order, they will have a very good case that they - not us - are the ones in charge.  We are caught in a bind.  If we fail to respond, we risk losing the sector; if we do respond ... we risk leaving ourselves vulnerable elsewhere.”

He met her eyes.  “Does that remind you of anything, Captain?”

“Yes, sir,” Naomi said.  “The opening moves of the Vultek War.”

“The Vulteks tested our resolve and found it lacking,” Adam agreed.  “It’s possible the Pashtali - or someone else - is trying the same thing.  We cannot ignore the provocation and yet responding to it may actually make things worse.”

Naomi hesitated.  “Sir ... permission to speak freely?”

“Always,” Adam said.

“Do we need to keep the zone?”  Naomi leaned forward.  “Is it worth the expenditure?”

“That is a political question,” Adam said.  “On one hand, we won it fairly and need to hang on to it.  On the other, as you say, it threatens to become a costly white elephant.”

He looked at his hands, then up at her.  “Right now, our mission is to try to secure the zone before it turns into another nightmare,” he said.  “And you will be an important part of the enhanced deployment.”

Naomi straightened as a holographic starship materialised in front of them.  Adam allowed himself a smile as her mask slipped, just slightly.  The hologram was no second- or third-hand starship, no jury-rigged warship built on a civilian hull; she was the first purpose-built battlecruiser the human race had designed and put into production.  He watched her drink in the details, allowing her all the time she needed.  The battlecruiser lacked the smooth elegance of a warcruiser, or the sheer oddity of some alien starships, but she had enough speed to outrun anything she couldn’t outfight.

“ESS Dauntless,” Adam said, as Naomi looked at him.  “She’s the first of a new breed of battlecruiser, although the Galactics would probably rate her a heavy cruiser.  She combines a multitude of human and alien technologies, ensuring she is both a solid-state ship and yet, at the same time, relatively easy to repair.  Her construction was slower than we had hoped - it took three years to work out the kinks - but she completed her shakedown cruise only last week and we think her sisters can be put together considerably faster.  She doesn’t have quite the firepower of a warcruiser, as we haven’t managed to duplicate the more advanced weapons they possess, but she does pack a considerable punch.  She’s also, as you can see, small and fast enough to evade more powerful foes.”

He smiled at her.  “She’s also your new command.”

“I ...”  Naomi looked torn between hope and fear.  “How does she handle?”

“The reports say she handles well,” Adam said.  “Of course, she hasn’t actually been in a shooting match.  Not yet.”

He smiled as he studied the display.  The Solar Navy hadn’t had the resources to invest in shipyards, certainly not as much as he wanted.  It was sheer luck the civilian yards they did have had been designed for hasty conversion to military use, the economic slowdown providing a suitable excuse for funding the work.  And yet ... he was painfully aware of just how many weak links there were in the supply chain.  The Solar Navy was still short of everything from modern sensors to weapons.  A third of the navy consisted of second-hand warships and the remainder of converted merchant ships.  Dauntless was a step in the right direction, of that he was sure, but it would be a long time before human ships could match the mighty warcruisers of the Pashtali and others.  Hell, he’d had enough trouble convincing the government they must invest in modern technologies and industrial nodes.  The price of warships had skyrocketed across the sector.  Everyone was gearing up for war.

“Your mission is to patrol the zone, but there’s a catch,” Adam said.  “You’ll be on semi-detached deployment.  You will not be under the direct orders of your local superiors; instead, you will patrol as you see fit, without reporting to anyone but me.  I believe their bases are not secure, which may explain the lack of success in pirate hunting.  The enclaves are just too numerous for anything to be guaranteed.”

Naomi frowned.  “They won’t like that, sir.”

“No,” Adam agreed.  The local CO would not be pleased to have an independent ship in his territory, if only because there might be an incident that would catch him by surprise.  There was no way around it.  Naomi would be treading on the local CO’s toes and he was not going to be happy.  “I’ll give you written orders and sealed messages for him.  Hopefully, he’ll have the sense not to push matters.”

He rubbed his forehead in frustration.  Ideally, the Solar Navy would have set up dedicated bases throughout the sector.  Failing that, they would have taken possession of the orbital facilities and communications nodes and placed a hold on all out-system traffic until the entire system had been checked from top to bottom.  But, politically speaking, it was impossible.  The enclaves within the occupied zone would protest, loudly, to their distant homeworlds and their homeworlds would take the protests as an opportunity to pressure humanity into making concessions.  He switched the display back to the starchart and cursed under his breath.  He had too many fires and too few firemen.  And too many races willing to pounce if they scented weakness.

And all it takes is a single incident to cause real trouble, he thought.  The general public might be riding high, after the victorious war, but he knew better.  Hell, someone might deliberately start an incident just to have an excuse to snatch a few of our worlds.

“Patrol the sector.  Intercept pirate attacks.  If you can find proof there’s an outside power behind the attacks, relay it to us.  Don’t cross the border into Pashtali space unless there’s no other choice.  Right now, we are in no position to push matters.”

Naomi grimaced.  “Sir ... it will be hard to track down and stop the pirates if they have a safe hiding place.”

“I know,” Adam agreed.  “But we cannot afford to give the Pashtali, or anyone, an excuse to cause trouble.  Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Naomi said.  

Adam heard the frustration in her voice and nodded, curtly.  She was right.  If the pirates thought they could get away by fleeing into Pashtali space, they would ... although, he supposed, the Pashtali would then have to deal with them or risk a clash with the rest of the superpowers.  He wondered, idly, if they’d care.  They were powerful enough to make it hard for anyone to challenge them, unlike humanity.  The other superpowers might be quietly relieved if Earth was taken down a peg or two.

It’s the same old story, he reflected.  Galactic Law only applies to the weak.

“I’ve arranged for a shuttle to take you to your new command,” he said, picking up a sealed envelope and holding it out to her.  “Your orders.  The remainder of the mission briefing is already on the ship.  Take command and prepare to depart, ideally within the week.  If something happens that requires your presence here, I’ll contact you.”

Naomi stood straighter.  “Yes, sir.”

“I’m not putting you in a good position,” Adam admitted.  “If there was another choice, I would take it. As it is ... be careful.  And good luck.”

“Thank you, sir,” Naomi said.  “I won’t let you down.”

Adam dismissed her with a nod, then leaned back in his chair and shook his head.  Five years ago, he’d intended to retire.  It had never occurred to him that the Alphans would simply abandon Earth, or that the newly-independent planet would be plunged into war with the Vulteks, or that Earth would find itself threatened by several different superpowers.  He cursed under his breath as he studied the starchart, silently noting just how overstretched the Solar Navy was.  The handful of strongpoints - fortifications established around various crossroads - weren’t enough to do more than delay a major thrust from one of the galactic superpowers.  Adam had seen the projections.  None of them ended well for the human race.  

His eyes lingered on the Alphan Empire.  They might just tip the balance, if they got involved again.  But would they?  Five years ago, he would have sworn a mighty oath the Alphans would never abandon large chunks of their empire.  Now ... humanity and several other races had just been freed, as if the Alphans could no longer be bothered to keep them.  There had been tensions, of course, but ... no one had expected, not really, that the empire would just abandon its subjects.  Now ... he frowned as he cancelled the display and stood, feeling every one of his seventy years.  The galaxy was gearing up for war and humanity was going to be caught in the middle.

We should probably start mining some of the threadlines, he thought, bitterly.  It would be the cheapest way to keep them out of our territories.

The thought mocked him as he poured himself a mug of coffee.  His political masters would never agree.  Mining crossroads was one thing; mining threadlines was quite another.  It would piss off the entire galaxy, particularly the powers that wanted to bring humanity into their empires.  He snorted.  Of course it would piss them off.  A girl carrying a pistol or a dagger would piss off her would-be rapist too, but who cared what the bastard thought?  Yet there were still idiots who dared object to self-defence.

His terminal chimed.  “Admiral,” Ensign Joe Tasman said.  “Commodore Hailey has arrived.”

Adam nodded and returned to the desk.  “Send her in.”

He smiled, thinly, as Commodore Sandra Hailey entered the office.  She was no line officer.  Indeed, it had been sheer luck she hadn’t been assigned to the Alphan Navy rather than being left with the Earth Defence Force.  Adam often wondered if that had been deliberate, if someone in the empire had thought Earth needed her, or a simple oversight.  Sandra was a technological genius, one of the few who could improve upon standard GalTech and try to match the Alphans at their own game.  Adam hoped she or her team would come up with a silver bullet.  The human race desperately needed one.

“Admiral,” Sandra said.  She was tall and blonde, although there was something about her appearance that suggested she hadn’t bothered to change clothes in days.  “Thank you for seeing me.”

Adam nodded.  “What can I do for you?”

“You asked for an update on the burner project,” Sandra said.  “We think we know, now, what they actually do.  They project a beam of high-intensity energy that, somehow, remains coherent long enough to actually strike a target.”

“Yes.”  Adam resisted the urge to point out that he, and every other serving officer in the navy, had known that for years.  “Can you duplicate it?”

“Sort of,” Sandra said.  “The system is ... something akin to a bomb-pumped laser, sir, but there’s no need to discard the launching system immediately afterwards.  Our research suggests they use superheated plasma, perhaps antimatter, to create the blast and generate internal forcefields that point the fire in the right direction.  It’s a little more complex than that ...”

Adam blinked.  “Wait a moment,” he said.  “They have internal forcefields?  On a starship?”

“It took us a while to figure it out,” Sandra said.  She smiled, as one does at solving a particularly complex puzzle.  “The energy surge actually creates and powers the forcefield, keeping it in existence long enough to direct the burner at its target.  We often wondered why burner seemed so limited, sir; why they practically had to point the entire ship in order to aim.  We understand now; they need an entire tube to generate the blast and fire without blowing up the ship itself.”

“If they can do that,” Adam asked, “why can’t they produce forcefield bubbles to protect their ships?”

“They couldn’t keep the forcefields active for more than a few seconds at most,” Sandra told him.  “The power demand would skyrocket.  They couldn’t stabilise the forcefield before they ran out of power.  Even a warcruiser couldn’t keep the forcefield active for long.”

“The PDCs have enough trouble,” Adam agreed.  “Can we duplicate their weapons?”

Sandra hesitated.  “Not for a starship, not yet,” she said, finally.  “We simply cannot produce their tubes, not without a few more breakthroughs.  But we can produce single-shot weapons.  They won’t have the firepower of the average warcruiser, but they’d give the enemy a nasty fright.”

“That’s true,” Adam agreed.  It wasn’t a silver bullet, but with careful use it might just be enough to give the enemy a bloody nose.  “I need your full report and ...”

His terminal bleeped.  “Admiral, we just received a direct message from Solar City,” Ensign Joe Tasman reported.  “The First Speaker has called an urgent meeting at 1700.”

“Inform him I’m on my way,” Adam ordered.  1700 meant he would barely have enough time to grab a shower before boarding the shuttle.  “Sandra, we’ll have to continue this conversation later.”

Sandra passed him a chip.  “My report,” she said.  “I put a barebones summary as well as the technical details.”

“Thank you.”  Adam feared he’d only have time to read the summary.  Urgent meetings were never good news.  “I’ll be in touch as soon as possible.”

Chapter Five

Solar City, Earth

There had been plans, Abraham recalled, to have the old secure conference room renovated for comfort as well as security.  It had originally been designed for Alphans and, even though there weren’t that many physical differences between humanity and its former masters, the room was just a little disorienting to someone who wasn’t used to alien proportions.  The plans, like so much else, had fallen by the wayside as Abraham’s party had struggled to put together a government that would last more than a few years without going sour or being replaced by another government that found itself in the same boat.  He wondered, as he took his chair, if the failure to renovate the chamber said good things or bad about his government.  On one hand, it was a minor matter; on the other, in an era of austerity, spending money on the government’s comfort was not going to look good at all.

It was easier when we were on the outside, sniping at the former government, he reflected, as the remainder of the inner council filed into the chamber.  And they could ask the Alphans to intervene if there was anything they didn’t feel comfortable handling.

He accepted a cup of coffee from an aide, then sat back and waited for the doors to close.  The chamber was as secure as human and alien tech could make it, although there were people in the security division who suspected the Alphans - who had supplied the tech - had ways to eavesdrop without making it obvious.  Abraham wasn’t so sure.  The Alphans had been many things, not all of them good, but they’d generally kept their word.  Besides, it wasn’t as if they’d needed to bother.  Back then, the government had been astonishingly loyal.  The real cracks in the facade hadn’t started to form until after the Solar City Massacre.

And by that point it was too late, he thought.  They were on the verge of pulling out anyway.

The doors closed.  Abraham cleared his throat.

“The emergency meeting is now in session,” he said, for the benefit of the recorders.  He would have preferred a more informal conversation, and he did his best to encourage it, but they had to keep a record of what was said by whom.  “Commodore Farnham?”

Commodore Farnham stood, looking oddly uneasy.  Abraham understood.  Farnham was - technically - on detached duty from the Solar Navy, but he should probably have contacted Admiral Glass first, if only to give his superior a heads up.  And yet ... Abraham shook his head, knowing it was a very minor matter.  The commodore and his superiors in the Survey Service wouldn’t have requested the emergency meeting if the issue hadn’t been urgent.  There’d been no time to go through more formal channels.

“Mr. Speaker,” Commodore Farnham said.  “Two hours ago, we received an emergency signal from ESS Magellan, a deep space survey ship assigned to update navigation charts in the Ballade Sector.  It was not good news.”

Abraham’s eyes narrowed as a holographic starchart materialised over the table.  The Ballade Sector was on the far side of human space, resting between Earth and the Alphan Empire.  He hadn’t expected any trouble from there, not when the handful of inhabited worlds were either dependent on the Alphans or simply too weak to build pocket empires of their own.  The galactic superpowers hadn’t taken any obvious interest in the sector, either.  They’d presumably feared that trying to establish bases and contracts with the locals would draw a sharp response from the Alphans.  Or so the EIS had insisted.

“During her mission” - the starchart updated as Farnham spoke - “she discovered that a number of threadlines were shrinking and, perhaps worse, gravity shoals within the threadlines that pose a major threat to passing starships.  Her captain made the decision to cross the edge of the threadline in an attempt to get readings on the region beyond.  She discovered the trailing edge of an immense multispace storm, making its way towards the galactic core.  It is hard to be sure, as sensor data was immensely distorted by the storm, but we think the threadlines running though the sector will shortly become difficult to navigate, if not snap completely.”

He paused.  “Magellan contacted observation stations at crossroads within the sector.  They confirmed high energy and material discharges at a number of crossroads, ones close enough to the storm to be affected.  Interstellar shipping within the sector has been much reduced over the last few years, but a handful of ships have been reported overdue and apparently missing to causes unknown.”

“I think we know now,” Vice Speaker Henry Travis said.

Abraham studied the display, unsure what to make of it.  The sheer scale of the storm was beyond unnerving.  If the figures were accurate, the storm was several dozen light years in diameter ... he wished, suddenly, that he’d spent more time studying multispace physics than politics in university.  The storm was both a very real threat and an oddly abstract one.  He didn’t know what to do ... if, indeed, there was anything they could do.  They might have to hunker down and wait.

Martin Solomon, Minister for Industrial and Economic Development, leaned forward.  “Assuming the storm continues to grow,” he said, “what do you think it will do to interstellar trade and communications?”

“It’s hard to say,” Farnham admitted.  “We have very little data on super-storms.  Much of the data we do have is badly outdated, passed down from the Alphans or a handful of other Galactics.  It is fairly clear the galaxy hasn’t seen such a big storm for decades, perhaps centuries.  The storm may collapse in on itself tomorrow and vanish, or it may linger for hundreds of years.  We simply don’t know.  We’re putting together missions to probe the outer edge of the storm, in hopes of getting more solid data, but it will be several weeks - at best - before we have anything.”

He took a breath.  “Our projections are unreliable, but we think - based on the data we do have - that travel through the sector will be sharply reduced.  Most civilian starships are not designed to travel outside the threadlines and, even if they were, the storm is powerful enough to vaporise a warcruiser.  If the threadlines are snapped, civilian shipping will have to take the long way around, adding weeks or months to the journey.  Certain systems may become effectively inaccessible, at least until we chart new threadlines leading to them.”

Solomon frowned.  “And what would happen if the storm expanded into the Sol Sector?”

“Disaster,” Farnham said, flatly.

Admiral Glass looked as if he’d bitten into something nasty.  “Perhaps I’m just being paranoid, but is there any chance someone could have triggered the storm deliberately?”

Abraham sucked in his breath.  The storm was effectively blocking travel between Earth and the Alphan Empire.  Trade networks were going to be disrupted, if they weren’t ruined beyond repair.  Any hope of military or economic support from the Alphans would be lost with them.  And with the growing tensions between the galactic superpowers ... it boded ill for the future.  The storm wouldn’t block a dozen races from trying to expand their empires at their neighbours’ expense.

“We don’t think so,” Farnham said.  “The Alphans are the only race - the only known race - that can manipulate multispace and even then, on a very small scale.  Generating a storm should be far beyond them.  The power requirements would be staggering and ... realistically speaking, we think it’s nothing more than bad luck.  We could be wrong, Admiral, but all the stories of races that can perform godlike acts are little more than fairy tales.  None of those stories were ever confirmed.”

“Except the storm appeared in precisely the right place to block threadlines leading into Alphan space,” Solomon said.  “The Alphans, who have spent the last five years disconnecting themselves from the rest of the galaxy.  If that’s a coincidence, it is a very unlikely one.”

“With all due respect, the Alphans are not gods,” Farnham said.  “If they had the power to warp multispace to such an extent, they would never have come close to losing the Lupine War.  They could have swatted the Lupines as effortlessly as we would swat a fly.  They could have literally channel bursts of energy out of multispace, or force a star to go supernova, or ... the possibilities are endless.  And it really isn’t like them to risk disaster.  The storm might spread into their territory, if it doesn’t recede back into nothingness.”

Abraham had to admit Farnham had a point.  The Alphans were an inherently conservative race.  They rarely did anything without planning it out in every detail, drawing up concepts and contingency plans that had to be approved in triplicate before being put into action.  The idea of them risking total disaster was absurd.  They would probably prefer to avoid messing with multispace completely, even if they thought they could make it work.  And besides, even if they were trying to wall themselves off from the universe, they’d be trapping millions of humans and other races with them.  It wouldn’t go down well at all.

“I agree, they are not gods,” he said.  “We will, of course, continue to investigate, but we will assume the storm is a natural event until proven otherwise.”

He looked around the table.  “What does this mean for us?”

Solomon nodded at the starchart.  “We have contracts with the Alphans to supply starship components and suchlike we cannot produce for ourselves, at least not in the qualities we require.  There will be, at best, significant delays in production if trade networks start to fail.  Merely forcing freighters to add a few more weeks to transit times will have significant knock-on effects.  If we lose contact completely, we will have to update our industrial base very quickly or the shortages will really start to bite.”

“As if they weren’t already,” Abraham said.

“Yes,” Solomon agreed.  “We might be able to make up the shortfall elsewhere, assuming the other trade networks remain intact, but we’ve been having trouble buying supplies on the galactic market.  Everyone and his dog wants military-grade hardware and most of the prospective buyers can afford to outbid us.  The Alphans gave us favoured trading status and even advanced us a handful of loans, perhaps in compensation for their hasty exit.  The rest of the galaxy will not be so kind.”

Admiral Glass muttered something under his breath.  “What will this do to starship production?”

“We can continue to churn out freighters, including vessels designed for conversion to warships,” Solomon said.  “We may be able to trade some of our freighters for real warships, although right now we cannot be sure.  Warship production is likely to slip sharply, once we run out of stockpiled components.  The sensors and suchlike we cannot produce for ourselves will need to be replaced, with - unfortunately - inferior components.  If push comes to shove, we will be at a severe disadvantage.”

Richard Hawthorne coughed.  “I thought we had contingency plans?”

“We do,” Solomon said.  “But many of our contingency plans are rough and ready, to say the least, and few will work against an opponent who knows how to use their gear.”

Abraham looked at Admiral Glass.  “From a military point of view?”

Admiral Glass took a moment to compose his thoughts.  “In the short term, relatively little will change.  We have no formal treaties with the Alphans beyond a memo of understanding, and they do not have any obligation to come to our aid if we are attacked, although we have tried to spread the suggestion they will declare war in our favour if things go badly.  It will take some time for the storm’s existence to start to change galactic astropolitics, but once it does things are likely to change quickly.  The Alphans will be unable to intervene, regardless of their feelings on the matter, if we are attacked.”

“It isn’t as if they did much of anything during the last war,” Solomon muttered.

“No,” Admiral Glass agreed.  “We will enter a prolonged period of vulnerability.  Galactic predators will have a window of opportunity to demand we make concessions, or simply cross the border and invade.  We will find it incredibly difficult to fight a prolonged war, one against an enemy who knows what they’re doing.  The Vulteks had no real concept of long-term thinking.  The Galactics will be more careful.”

He nodded to the display.  “We can take some steps to secure our borders, and make us look like a hard target, but there are limits.  No matter how many guns and missile launchers we cram into freighters, they are not warships.  A program of extensive minelaying along the threadlines leading to Earth would make life harder for anyone intent on invading our worlds, but if we started mining the approaches before a declaration of war we would risk a clash with the rest of the superpowers.  In the short term, we can push production; in the long term, it will burn through our stockpiles and cause major slowdowns later on.  Realistically, we need allies.”

Abraham couldn’t disagree.  Earth was a minor power, in the grand scheme of things, and adding hundreds of converted warships to the fleet as a stopgap measure wouldn’t change it.  He hated to admit it, even to himself, but Earth offered the Galactics little ... certainly nothing they couldn’t just take, if they wanted it.  The Galactics wouldn’t have to occupy Earth to render the human race powerless.  They’d just have to take control of the crossroads and the high orbitals and dictate terms.

“That may be tricky,” Hawthorne said.  “The Galactics simply don’t take us seriously.”

“No,” Abraham agreed.  He glanced at Farnham.  “Do the Galactics know about the storm?”

“They should,” Abraham said.  “The Survey Service is built on cooperation between spacefaring races.  Magellan’s message was relayed through several non-human stations in the sector.  It would be astonishing if it wasn’t forwarded to the Galactics.  They may not believe it, of course.  Not at first.  But they will.”

“Damn,” Travis said.

“It wasn’t going to remain unnoticed forever,” Abraham pointed out.  Earth couldn’t afford to duck her interstellar obligations.   The human race wasn’t strong enough to deter a more predatory race from using the incident as an excuse to take over.  “Better to look like we’re honouring the treaties, rather than trying to take advantage of them.”

“We will have to make some kind of statement,” Jenny Geddes said.  The Internal Minister inclined her head towards the starchart.  “The average citizen isn’t going to grasp what’s happening, at least at first.  They may think it’s just a matter of time before interstellar trade collapses completely, that we’ll be locked out of multispace for the foreseeable future.  There will be panic.”

“And relief,” Admiral Glass said.  “If we can’t get out, they can’t get in.”

“A third of our economy is dependent on interstellar trade,” Solomon said.  “Losing it will be utterly disastrous.  Just losing contact with the rest of our worlds will be quite bad enough.”

“And we don’t even know it will happen,” Abraham said.  “What are the odds?”

“Unknown,” Farnham said.  “We have no solid data.  The only thing we have to go on are stories from the dim and distant past, stories of storms that reshaped multispace and snuffed out entire civilisations; stories, sir, which may be nothing more than tall tales.  The storm may sweep over us, or it may vanish tomorrow.”

Abraham heard a hint of irritation in Farnham’s voice and smiled, inwardly.  It wasn’t uncommon for someone to have to repeat themselves, when dealing with politicians who assumed the world could be changed on a whim.  He knew he couldn’t afford any such illusions and yet, there was a part of him that insisted he should be able to make something work just by wishing it to be.  The storm was a fact of life, be it a natural disaster or alien-made catastrophe.  It wouldn’t go away if Abraham covered his eyes and pretended it wasn’t there.

“We’ll make a formal announcement this evening,” he said.  “Before then, I want a plan to redirect shipping through the sector, to keep it away from the storm, and a hasty survey mission to see if we can chart any new threadlines.  I’ll also speak directly to the ambassadors and see if they have any insights or are willing to consider lending us aid.  Anything else?”

“We should go on alert,” Admiral Glass said.  “It’s probably too soon to call up the reserves and start requisitioning freighters for military conversion, but I’d like to get out a warning so the reservists know to start making preparations.”

“It might be seen as provocative,” Hawthorne pointed out.  “The Galactics are unlikely to react calmly.”

“We couldn’t invade their space, even if we wanted to,” Admiral Glass countered.  “And they know it.”

“It would also cause economic dislocations at the worst possible time,” Jenny Geddes added, glancing at Solomon.  “Simply pulling freighters out of the trade networks would cause all sorts of problems.”

Solomon nodded.  “We shouldn’t make preparations for a full mobilisation unless we know we’re about to be attacked,” he said.  “The costs will be too high.”

“The cost of being attacked will also be high, particularly if we’re not ready,” Admiral Glass snapped.  “There is no way we can count on slowing an invader down long enough to call up the reserves, arm the ships and get them into position.”

Abraham watched the argument grimly, knowing both sides had a point.  The economy was already frail.  It couldn’t take the chaos of a mobilisation warning, let alone a mobilisation.  And yet ... if an alien race attacked, humanity wouldn’t have time to mobilise.  There was no way to square the circle.  Whatever he did, there were going to be problems.

“We can issue a warning, put the reservists on alert,” he said.  “If we need to call them up, if the shit hits the fan, we can do so.”

And he hoped, as he stood and dismissed the meeting, that he’d made the right call.

Chapter Six

ESS Dauntless, Sol Asteroid Belt

It was a source of much frustration, to Naomi and her peers, that the vast majority of the Solar Navy’s warships were second- or third-hand. The Alphans hadn’t wanted the Earth Defence Force to develop its own shipyards or industrial nodes, certainly not ones that might pose a threat to them, and they’d ensured strict limits on just what their subjects could build for themselves.  The warships weren’t bad, and the crews knew how to get the best out of them, but they weren’t designed for humans.  No matter how many refits the ships underwent, when they changed hands, they were still alien.  They just didn’t feel right.

She stared into space as the shuttle glided through the network of sensor and weapons platforms and approached the free-floating slip on the edge of the Pournelle Shipyards.  The shipyards had started life as a purely civilian structure but, from what she’d heard, the operators had been working on military technology even before the human race had been granted independence.  It had grown in the past five years, despite the economic slowdown; the shuttle’s sensors picked up hundreds of asteroid mining facilities, industrial nodes and construction slips orbiting the core facilities.  The Solar Navy had invested heavily in the shipyard and it showed.  It was hard to believe, looking at the lights in front of her, that the shipyard was actually small, as shipyards went.  The Galactics had built much bigger facilities over the last few hundred centuries.

And this shipyard is barely a century old, she reminded herself.  Give us a few more decades and we’ll see.

She put the thought out of her mind and leaned forward as the shuttle started to reduce speed.  The battlecruiser was slowly coming into view ... she stared, feeling a twinge of anticipation mingled with fear.  Dauntless was a flattened cylinder, bristling with weapons; her eyes tracked over the hull, noting all the installations she’d seen when she’d scanned the technical specs.  The battlecruiser was three hundred metres long, with a crew of four hundred souls ... all of whom were now her responsibility.  She remembered her last commanding officer and shuddered.  He’d been able to hide in his cabin and duck his job.  She had no such luxury.

The pilot looked up.  “Do you want me to orbit the ship first?”

“No, thank you,” Naomi said.  She was tempted, but she knew she needed to board her new command as quickly as possible.  The First Admiral had made it clear Dauntless was needed in the occupied zone.  “Take us to the shuttleport.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Naomi braced herself as the shuttle glided towards Dauntless, the battlecruiser growing larger and larger until she dominated the horizon.  Her armour looked oddly pitted, compared to a warcruiser, as if the construction teams hadn’t bothered to sand it down before they cleared the ship for her shakedown cruise.  The Galactics would sneer, she was sure, at her ship’s crude appearance.  She hoped it would bite them hard, if they felt like starting something.  The armour was designed to combine resilience with ease of repair, allowing the repair crews to pull out damaged sections and discard them, before replacing them with a new plate from the hold.  Dauntless might not have the solid-state armour of a warcruiser, but she was almost as tough and she was a great deal easier to repair.  Or so the designers had promised.

The gravity field flickered as the shuttle mated with the shuttleport.  Naomi took a long breath.  The gravity felt ... right.  It never had before, not on the alien-designed ships.  She was sure she was imagining it - she’d certainly been told the gravity field had been adjusted to match Earth - but she’d never been able to get over it.  Now ... she braced herself as the hatch hissed open, a gust of air brushing against her face as the pressure equalised.  The air smelt right too, although there was the indefinable tang of a new-built ship.  She told herself, firmly, she shouldn’t complain.  No matter how many times the crew had replaced the atmosphere scrubbers on the old ships, there had always been something in the air.  This one would start smelling like its crew soon enough.

She stepped through the hatch, moving with exaggerated care.  The gravity fields seemed to have melded perfectly, but she knew from experience the fields could cause someone to trip and hit the deck.  This time, nothing happened.  She allowed herself a moment of relief as she lifted her eyes to the flag, saluted, and turned to the reception committee.  Commander Janet Ruthven saluted her, a strange mix of emotions in her eyes.  Naomi understood.  Janet had been in command, until now.  She’d known it wouldn’t last, but ... she hadn’t wanted to give it up either.

Naomi smiled.  “Permission to come aboard?”

“Granted, Captain,” Janet said.  “It’s good to see you again.”

“And you,” Naomi said.  They’d served together on Washington, before Independence and the Vultek War.  “What do you make of Dauntless?”

Janet grinned.  “She had a lot of little problems at first,” she said.  “Her drives are actually overpowered, for a ship this size.  She came very close to nearly killing us all when we powered them up for the first time, then again when she nearly disabled the internal compensator.  We spent most of the first two weeks troubleshooting, figuring out what was wrong and how best to fix it.  Took us longer than it should have done, I think, but we made it in the end.  The next ship should get through her shakedown cruise a great deal quicker.”

“Good.”  Naomi wasn’t surprised.  She’d been a spacer long enough to know there were always ... glitches ... with new designs, from computer and drive failures to airlocks that didn’t close properly and air scrubbers that simply didn’t work.  Groundpounders might scoff at each individual fault and wonder why the design hadn’t been left on the drawing board where they thought it belonged, but spacers knew better.  There was no such thing as a faultless starship.  “The shipyard crew will be pleased.”

Janet’s grin grew wider.  “Her weapons are good, perhaps the best outside the galactic superpowers.  Her sensors and suchlike are straight from the Alphan Empire.  We ran tracking exercises, while she was under cloak, and found it hard to detect her even when she was right on top of the sensor platforms.  Anything we can’t outfight, we can outrun.  Probably.  I wouldn’t care to play catch with a warcruiser, but anything else should be fair game.”

Naomi frowned.  “A warcruiser could slip into multispace and get ahead of us, then drop out right in front of us.”

“Yes, Captain,” Janet said.  “Although we’d see them go into multispace and alter course ourselves, in hopes of really throwing them off.”

“Or simply cloak,” Naomi agreed.  “They might have problems finding us again.”

She felt her frown deepen as they passed through a pair of airlocks.  The scientists had sworn blind they would find out how to enter and exit multispace without a crossroads, but - so far - all their research hadn’t produced anything in the way of viable hardware.  If the Alphans hadn’t shown the galaxy it was possible, she suspected most of the Galactics would have simply assumed it wasn’t.  The Alphans had never shared that secret with anyone.  Knowing something was possible was half the battle, she’d been told, but so far the other half remained unsolved.  It might be years before anyone else figured out how the trick was done.

And every spacefaring race is trying to figure out the secret, she reminded herself.  The race that cracks it first will become the new superpower.

She put the thought out of her mind as they walked past a handful of crewmen making the final preparations for departure.  Janet had done a good job; the crew had boarded the ship, taken up their posts and started running through training exercises to make sure they knew what they were doing.  Naomi was too experienced of an officer to imagine it wouldn’t, not when the window of opportunity for snatching chunks of human space was rapidly closing.  Earth was growing stronger by the day.  The human race didn’t have to crush a galactic superpower to deter an invasion.  Earth only had to look strong enough to threaten any invader with a thoroughly pyrrhic victory.  Who’d pick a fight with Earth if even victory left them so weak they could be jumped on by their nearest rival?

The hatch hissed open as they approached, allowing her to step onto the bridge.  The compartment was bigger - and busier - than she’d expected, the bridge crew running training simulations on their consoles as they prepared for war.  Naomi took a breath as she looked around, silently relieved they weren’t paying much attention to her.  The command chair looked new ... she shook her head, reminding herself that her previous command chairs had been new too.  And yet ... her eyes lingered on the near-space display, the sensors tracking shuttles and work pods as they glided around the shipyard.  The holographic display was an order of magnitude more detailed than anything she’d seen before, right down to images of tiny sensor platforms holding station outside the shipyard.  The projector itself was hardly new - humanity had long since mastered holographic projection - but the sensors were remarkable.  It made her wonder just what the other Galactics had concealed.

Janet cleared her throat.  “Captain on the bridge.”

Naomi nodded.  The Solar Navy had never stood on ceremony, perhaps in reaction to their former masters using ceremony as yet another means of control, but there were some ceremonies that couldn’t be avoided.  The ship and her crew had to know she’d taken command before something happened, or confusion over who was in command of the ship would cost precious seconds at the worst possible time.  She felt an odd little pang at the thought as she removed an envelope from her jacket and opened it, feeling eyes on her.  Janet was a good officer.  It felt wrong to be shunting her aside, even though they’d both known it was coming.  Janet was just too junior to be jumped all the way to command rank practically overnight.

It could be worse, she told herself, wryly.  The Alphan officers take centuries to reach command rank.

“By order of the Solar Navy Admiralty, I am assuming command of ESS Dauntless,” she said, as she passed the envelope to Janet.  “I relieve you.”

Janet saluted.  If the effective demotion to XO bothered her, she didn’t show it.  “I stand relieved.”

Naomi allowed herself a moment of relief.  The Alphan captains took hours to assume their commands, following a ceremony that had been laid down long before humanity had floated anything larger than a rowboat.  The Solar Navy didn’t have the time to worry about it.  She pressed her hand against the scanner on the command chair, unlocking the ship’s innermost protocols, then sat.  A stream of data authorisations ran across the display, informing the crew that she’d taken command.  There shouldn’t be any confusion over who was in command now.

And we can smooth any issues out before we go to war, she thought.  She would have preferred a month or two to shake the crew down, to get to know her ship and establish her authority, but that wasn’t an option.  At least we should have enough time in transit to sort out the details ...

She sat back in her chair, wishing she had more time to enjoy it.  But she didn’t.

***

“Welcome to your new post,” the pilot said.  A dull clank ran through the shuttlecraft as she docked with the battlecruiser.  “Try not to get yourself killed, alright?”

Lieutenant Wesley Anderson, Solar Marines, tried to conceal his irritation as the hatch hissed open.  The pilot’s sense of humour was about as funny as the dreaded POW Survival Course, where the instructors had no qualms about putting the recruits through hell before finally - reluctantly - clearing them to proceed.  Wesley had been a spacer his entire life - he’d been born on an independent freighter - and he was used to the gallows humour that kept spacers laughing, but there were limits.  He’d found his patience tested so far that he thought he deserved a medal for not putting his fist through the man’s skull.

The urban unrest exercises were easier, he reflected, as he picked up his knapsack and slung it over his shoulder.  They might have been shouting insults, but at least we weren’t crammed in a small shuttle with them for hours upon hours.

He cursed under his breath and clambered through the outer hatch.  His orders had taken him by surprise, if only because he’d been expecting an assignment to the 1st Marine Division before his new orders had arrived.  An officer had died in an accident - Wesley had checked - and a replacement was needed as a matter of urgency, even if the only replacement on hand was a junior LT with very little combat experience.  But then, he had spent most of his life onboard ship.  It was hardly uncommon, but ...

A grim-faced man, a sergeant, met him as he stepped through the inner hatch.  His nametag read ROSS.  “Lieutenant Anderson?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” Wesley said.  Technically, he outranked the sergeant.  Practically, junior officers were taught to listen to the sergeants if they wanted to get home alive.  “Reporting as ordered.”

“You can report to the Major,” Sergeant Ross said.  It was oddly harsh, for someone technically addressing a superior officer.  “Follow me.”

Wesley nodded, hefted his knapsack and followed the sergeant through a maze of corridors.  The orders hadn’t said much of anything about Dauntless, not even a description of her internal layout, but he had no trouble figuring out how the system worked.  The battlecruiser was far larger than the family freighter, yet the layout was just as logical.  Marine Country was located towards the rear of the ship ...

“Major Drache will see you in his office,” Ross said.  “When you’re done with him, leave your gear in the barracks and report to me.  We’ll get you settled.”

Wesley tensed.  Major Drache?  The name was familiar ... there couldn’t be two of them, could there?  It wasn’t uncommon - he’d met quite a few people called Anderson - and yet, in the Solar Marines, there was only one Major Drache.  Sergeant Ross’s expression darkened, just for a second, as the sergeant nodded to the hatch.  Wesley put his qualms aside and pressed the buzzer.  The hatch opened a moment later.

He stepped inside.  “Lieutenant Wesley Anderson, reporting as ordered.”

Major Drache - it was the Major Drache - studied him for a long moment.  Wesley studied him back, unsure what to feel.  Major Drache was both a hero and a villain, a man many people had hoped would quietly retire and slip into the shadows after the war.  No one quite knew what to make of him.  Was he a hero or a mass murderer or ... or what?

He tried to stop the slaughter, Wesley reminded himself.  Even if he was unsuccessful, at least he tried.

“Welcome,” Major Drache said.  His voice was calm, tightly controlled.  “Do you know why I requested you personally?”

Wesley blinked.  He hadn’t expected that.  He’d spent four years in the Solar Marines, first as a rifleman and then as an OCS candidate, but he hadn’t made his mark.  A few months on Mars, a few months on Liberty, a brief deployment to an alien enclave in the occupied zone ... it hadn’t been a distinguished career.  And yet ... Major Drache had requested him personally?  It made no sense.  

“No, sir,” he said, slowly.

“You spent most of your life on a freighter,” Major Drache explained.  “And you know the occupied zone fairly well.”

“I didn’t spend that long there, sir,” Wesley cautioned.  He knew better than to exaggerate his experience.  The corps would take a very dim view of it.  “I was a child, then a very junior officer.  There were a lot of places I was simply never allowed to go.”

And a lot of others I wouldn’t dare go without powered combat armour, a regiment of troops and air support on hand, he added, silently.  Dad would have killed me for even thinking about going there as a child.

“Better than many others,” Major Drache said.  “Our orders are to continue to establish law and order within the occupied zone.  Your experience will be very helpful.”

“Yes, sir,” Wesley said.  “I understand.”

“You may also help us prevent any ... incidents,” Major Drache added.  “You’ll read the briefing papers during the voyage, in your copious spare time, but the short version is that we cannot afford a clash with an alien superpower.  We must do everything by the book in hopes of preventing such a clash.  Even if we do ... the freighter crews will scream blue murder to anyone who’ll listen.  Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”  Wesley had watched, helplessly, as customs inspectors clomped through the freighter, looking for excuses to levy fines.  The experience had been humiliating.  No one was hated as much as customs inspectors, certainly not by independent freighters.  If a customs inspector happened to step out of the airlock and straight into space, the entire crew would swear up and down it had been a terrible accident.  “We will not make ourselves popular.”

“No,” Major Drache agreed.  It crossed Wesley’s mind, just for a second, that Major Drache might have been given the job because he could be sacrificed if necessary.  He was, at best, a very controversial figure.  “But we have to establish law and order before it is too late.”

Chapter Seven

ESS Dauntless, Sol Asteroid Belt

“So,” Admiral Glass said.  His hologram floated in front of Naomi’s desk, only the slight shimmer betraying its incorporeal nature.  “How do you like your ship?”

She tried not to smile too broadly, but it was hard.  “She’s wonderful, sir,” she said.  A week of exploring the battlecruiser from top to bottom, comparing the designs to the reality, had convinced her it was time the human race built most of its own ships.  “We won’t know for sure until we take her into action, but right now she’s as close to perfect as humanly possible.”

“And hopefully capable of being repaired quickly, if you run into trouble,” Admiral Glass said.  “We have very little in the way of repair facilities in the occupied zone.”

“Yes, sir,” Naomi said.  “We’ve drilled removing and replacing hull plates while under fire.”

She smiled, tightly.  The Alphan warcruisers were hellishly effective battleships.  There was no doubt about it.  Naomi wouldn’t have cared to face one with an entire fleet of Dauntless-class battlecruisers under her command.  But when they were damaged, they were also difficult to repair without a dedicated shipyard.  The Lupines had come alarmingly close to winning the war because they’d disabled or destroyed ships that simply couldn’t be replaced in a hurry.  Dauntless might look crude compared to a warcruiser, but - if the designers were right - she might be far more effective in the long run.

Particularly as we don’t have to alter position to aim our guns at incoming targets, she thought.  The Lupines had taken advantage of that too, during the war.  We can fire in all directions without needing to break off our attack run.

She took a breath.  “You have my full report, sir, but my general feeling is that we’re ready to leave on schedule.”

“Good,” Admiral Glass said, calmly.  “Convoy Three-Golf-Nine is ready to depart alongside you.  Escort them to their destination, then proceed as planned.  Remain alert for trouble, Captain.  Multispace isn’t as safe as it used to be.”

“No,” Naomi agreed.  The news about the storm had broken a week ago.  She hadn’t had time to keep a close eye on the public reaction, but the news reports suggested the economy had taken a dip as it became clear interstellar shipping networks would have to be rerouted, if not cut altogether.  “We’ll keep our eye open for other storms.”

Admiral Glass grimaced.  “We really don’t need another one,” he said.  “Realistically, we don’t know how far the one we’ve got will spread.”

Naomi nodded, hiding her concern.  She’d been a spacer long enough to know space was a very deadly environment.  Even the Alphans didn’t take multispace lightly.  Flying a starship, even a warship or survey vessel, into a storm was only marginally safer than flying directly into a star.  If the storm swept over human space, the human worlds would be cut off from the galactic community ... and also from each other, as long as the storm lasted.  If ... she told herself, firmly, it wouldn’t happen.

But there are legends of storms that crushed entire spacefaring civilisations, she thought, numbly.  Even she had heard the stories.  What if that happens to us?

Admiral Glass leaned forward.  “You have your orders,” he said.  “I know I’m not putting you in an easy position.  If things go wrong, open your sealed orders and blame it on me.  I’ll be retiring in a year or two anyway.”

“Yes, sir,” Naomi said.  It was hard not to feel guilty.  “I won’t let you down.”

“Keep in touch, as per orders,” Admiral Glass added.  He raised a hand in salute.  “Good luck.”

His image vanished before Naomi could reply.  She stared at where it had been for a long moment.  Admiral Glass had gone to some lengths to ensure he - and he alone - could be reasonably blamed if the mission led to disaster.  She suspected he hadn’t done it alone, that the government knew what he was doing, but ... they could maintain plausible deniability.  Admiral Glass would be alone, if things went wrong.  She swallowed hard, wondering what she should do if they did.  Share the blame?  The odds were good there’d be enough to go around.

She stood and strode onto the bridge.  It felt like home, now she’d spent a week getting to know her command crew and understand their duties.  Dauntless wasn’t that different from a regular starship, not really ... she had a larger crew than Washington, but it was just a matter of scaling things up.  Janet was a good XO and her department heads knew how to handle themselves.  The only real danger, she reflected as she took her chair, was that she’d forget to let her staff handle their departments.  The urge to look over their shoulders, perhaps to micromanage, was almost overwhelming. 

“Communications, contact Shipyard Command,” she ordered.  “Inform them that we, and the convoy, will be departing as planned.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Naomi checked her console as a low shiver ran through her ship, the drive nodes coming online one by one.  They’d been powered up before, both individually and collectively, but it still felt as if it was the first time.  Her lips twitched at the thought as more and more updates flowed into the display, each department reporting ready for departure.  She told herself, firmly, that her crew was well-trained and experienced.  They knew what they were doing.

And they fixed most of the problems in the shakedown cruise, she thought.  There shouldn’t be any issues now.

Janet joined her.  “Captain,” she said, formally.  “We are ready to depart.”

“Communications, clear us a path through the shipyard,” Naomi ordered.  “Helm, bring the drive field online.”

“Aye, Captain,” Lieutenant James Wood said.  The communications officer didn’t look up.  “They’ve cleared us to leave the secure zone.”

Naomi leaned forward.  “Helm, take us out.”

She braced herself as the thrumming grew louder.  She’d heard horror stories of starships that had started to leave the shipyard, only to suffer complete drive failure before they’d even managed to get out of the slip.  She didn’t think it would happen now - they’d powered up the drives and run every test they could - but she couldn’t help worrying.  Dauntless was the first true human-designed and built warship.  If she suffered a complete failure now, any hope of building - and selling - more would be lost.  

The display shifted, the slip retreating as the battlecruiser made her way out of the shipyard and into the open space beyond.  The convoy was already waiting for them; nine freighters, a handful clearly mounting weapons that had been bolted to the hull.  They’d be enough to deter pirates, she thought, but not interstellar commerce raiders.  The former wanted to get the ship somewhere safe and loot it; the latter just wanted the ship gone.  Anyone who merely wanted to blow human freighters into dust would simply do it from a safe distance.  She put the thought out of her head as she studied the display.  All systems were well within acceptable parameters.  It was time to go.

“Helm, take us to the crossroads,” she ordered.  “Communications, inform the freighters they are to follow us.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Naomi settled back in her chair as the small convoy picked up speed.  There was no need to push the drives any harder, as the freighters could not possibly match their speed.  Instead, she studied the display, frowning as she realised the number of ships entering or leaving the crossroads had fallen sharply.  That was odd.  The crossroads itself was unaffected by the distant storm - it was dozens of light years away - but interstellar shipping had definitely taken a hit.  She glanced at the latest reports, resting in her inbox for when she had a chance to read them.  If it was bad here, it had to be a great deal worse in the occupied zone.  And that would be very bad for the settlers, human and alien alike.

Discuss it with Janet later, she told herself.  She’d hated being locked out of the loop when she’d been the XO.  Naomi didn’t intend to leave her own XO unaware of what was going on, certainly when there was no pressing need to do so.  She might have some insights.

She scowled as her eyes wandered over the local defences.  The fortresses and makeshift weapons platforms, built on asteroids that had been steered over to the crossroads, looked tough, but she knew they were nowhere near formidable enough to deter an enemy who didn’t mind soaking up losses.  Civilians never understood.  The crossroads might be tiny, compared to the sheer immensity of the entire star system, but it was still vast compared to even the largest orbital structure.  And an enemy ship could appear anywhere within the crossroads.  Even with automated defences on hair-triggers, not something anyone would risk outside full-scale war, the enemy would still have the edge.

We need to do some intensive minelaying, she thought.  But the galactic superpowers would prefer we remain naked and defenceless.

“Captain,” Lieutenant Neil Murray said.  “We are cleared to enter the crossroads.”

Naomi nodded.  “Take us in.”

The ship seemed to lurch.  Naomi heard someone retch behind her and purposely didn’t look ‘round to see who.  The transit was always uncomfortable, although different people reacted in different ways.  She swallowed hard, tasting bile.  The ship seemed to swing back and forth, as if she was a boat caught in a storm, before everything settled.  She took a long breath as the freighters popped into existence behind them.  The mission was finally underway.

“Helm, set course for Theta Sigma,” she ordered, as if the helmsman wouldn’t have the course already programmed into his console.  Helmsmen were cautioned to have the courses worked out well before the captain called for them.  “Communications, establish solid links to the freighters.  We don’t want them wandering off and getting lost.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Course laid in, Captain,” Murray said.

Naomi grinned.  “Engage.”

She took a moment to study the threadline as the convoy picked up speed.  It didn’t look to have shrunk, although - this close to the crossroads - it was hard to be sure.  The handful of ships within sensor range didn’t look concerned ... she told herself, firmly, there was no reason to think the storm would have any effect on their passage through multispace.  It was too far away.  And yet ... she found it hard to rid herself of the feeling altogether.  They were in unexplored waters.

“XO, you have the bridge,” Naomi said.  She had reports and updates to read before she started checking her departments again.  “I’ll be in my ready room.  Alert me at once if anything changes.”

“Aye, Captain,” Janet said.

Naomi nodded and stepped into her ready room, feeling the full weight of command crashing down on her.  She was alone, sole commander of her ship ... she was responsible for everyone within her hull, everyone under her command.  And she was alone ... she reminded herself, dryly, that Dauntless was hardly her first command.  The Solar Navy wouldn’t have given the latest and greatest battlecruiser to an officer who’d just made captain.  Naomi knew she’d been lucky to inherit command of Washington.  If things had been different, she’d have been assigned to a destroyer or frigate instead.  

She keyed the display, bringing up the lights of multispace.  She’d spent much of her career in multispace, bored out of her mind even though there was never any shortage of things to do.  There were people who made all sorts of claims about multispace, from seeing utterly unrealistic alien ships to godlike entities ... Naomi didn’t believe a word of them, but sometimes she wondered.  No one was quite sure why the Alphans were the oldest known race on the block.  They might have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, but the universe was billions of years old.  Simple logic suggested there had to have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of races before them.  Where were they?

Not that it matters, she thought, as she pulled up the first report.  It was astonishing how many tales there were of artefacts from super-advanced races - and how few of those tales had ever been substantiated.  Right now, we have too many other concerns.

***

Wesley had thought he’d known what pain was.

He’d grown up on a freighter, then joined the corps.  Boot Camp had been hard from the start and somehow managed to grow harder and harder, until he looked back on three months of intensive training and wondered how he’d managed to get through it without throwing up his hands and quitting.  And then he’d been assigned to a unit as a rifleman and discovered, even in peacetime, that the corps had too much to do.  And then there’d been OCS ...

The first week on Dauntless had been difficult.  Major Drache hadn’t exaggerated when he’d said the unit had been thrown together in haste.  Wesley had wanted to take comfort in the fact he wasn’t the only maggot who thought he was an officer, the only FNG who thought his shit didn’t stink, but Sergeant Ross and his peers hadn’t given them any time to think.  They’d run through endless drills, ranging from basic training sims to far more complex exercises that exceeded anything anyone had ever seen in real life, until the unit finally started to take on a coherent form.  It wasn’t easy.  The corps had ensured they all had the same basic training, but very few of the officers - let alone the men - had served together before the assignment.  It made him wonder just how quickly the entire deployment had been thrown together.

“Well,” Major Drache said, addressing the officers.  “That was an interesting disaster, wasn’t it?”

Wesley wiped sweat from his forehead.  The VR sim had been rigged.  It wasn’t uncommon for training odds to be slanted against the soldiers - hard training, easy mission; easy training, hard mission - but it was still irritating.  He wasn’t even sure if they were ever going to land on a planetary surface, let alone carry out a plan that had clearly been devised by a civilian who had no idea how things actually worked.  Wesley had known it was going to go poorly the moment he’d looked at the map.  The jokes about how deadly lieutenants could be if they had a map in one hand and a compass in the other had suddenly stopped being funny.

“Yes, sir,” he said, when Drache looked at him.  “We shouldn’t have taken the long way around.”

Drache eyed him for a long moment.  “Why?”

“We did a cross-country march on bad terrain that ended with a direct assault on the enemy position,” Wesley said.  Sure, they’d been barred from using helicopters or skimmers or orbital insertion, but they could have come up with something else.  The VR simulation had been strikingly realistic.  “The direct route was supposed to be off limits, yet we could have gotten through without triggering the sensors.  Or we could have marched to a point near the target and rested up before launching the attack itself.”

“You had a time limit,” Drache pointed out.  “You needed to be in and out before you ran out of time.”

Wesley suspected he was being tested, but he was too tired to care.  “Sir, with all due respect, there was no need for a time limit.  It wasn’t a hostage situation or anything that hampered our freedom of operations.  We could have handled it much more effectively with more freedom of action.”

“Perhaps,” Drache agreed.  “Tell me, why do you think I imposed those limits?”

Wesley felt the rest of the officers watching him as he fought to compose an answer.  “I don’t know, sir,” he admitted.  Nothing came to mind.  Drache was controversial, but he wasn’t an asshole.   “They make no sense.”

“Not here, no,” Drache said.  He addressed the entire room.  “We are used to operating in friendly or neutral territory.  Even in the occupied zone, we are the legitimate authority and can call on support from aerial units or orbiting starships.  We have a degree of flexibility we use - we exploit - to handle situations that would be harder, if not impossible, without it.  We can be threatened, we can be hurt, but we cannot lose control.”

He paused.  “That may be about to change.  If the Galactics thrust into our space, we will lose that advantage very quickly.  We may be inserted into their worlds, to spy on them and direct attacks from a distance; we may be forced to work beside human and alien militias as they resist their new alien overlords.  We dare not grow used to an advantage we may lose at any moment.  Do I make myself understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Wesley said.

“Good,” Drache said.  “Anderson, remain behind.  The rest of you, dismissed.”

Wesley stood to attention, bracing himself.  Drache waited until the compartment was empty, then looked at Wesley.  “You did well on the exercise, particularly given it was rigged against you,” he said.  “I take it you noticed?”

“Yes, sir,” Wesley said.

“And you accessed my file nine times in the past three weeks,” Drache added, thoughtfully.  “Do you have a question?”

Wesley flushed.  “Sir, I ...”

“You could have gleaned everything important from a single glance,” Drache said.  “Why did you read and reread the file?”

“I ...”  Wesley met Drache’s eyes.  “I wanted to know what really happened five years ago.”

Drache’s face hardened.  “What happened, Lieutenant, is that a fop who was utterly unprepared for his role was put in command of a company and given orders he didn’t have the slightest idea how to carry out.  And if I had been wiser, perhaps I would have put a bullet in the back of his head and taken the court-martial, rather than ending up with blood on my hands.  But I was unable to prevent him from issuing the order to fire.”

“Sir, I ...”

“Whatever you were going to say, save it,” Drache growled.  “There’s blood on my hands because I failed to act in time.  And I do not want you, or anyone else, to make the same mistake.  It is vitally important that you learn to think about your orders, before you start to carry them out.  My mistake took the lives of hundreds of innocent people.”

He pointed at the hatch. “If you’re lucky, you’ll never face the same problem,” he said.  “Go.”

Wesley saluted.  “Yes, sir.”

Chapter Eight

Solar City, Earth

“Thank you for inviting me,” Ambassador Yasuke said, as he was shown into the meeting room.  “It has been an interesting few weeks.”

Abraham nodded.  The storm wasn’t an immediate threat, and many of the feared disasters had yet to materialise, but it hadn’t stopped the rumours.  The storm’s sheer magnitude, some claimed, suggested interstellar civilisation was about to collapse; others, perhaps more reasonably, feared the economic collapse they knew would come in its wake.  The government had weathered the storm - his lips quirked at the play on words - so far, but that could change at any moment.  Once the storm really started to bite, all hell would break loose.

And it isn’t as if we can redirect the storm, he thought.  There’d been proposals to do just that, but - according to the more grounded scientists - they were little more than wishful thinking and science-fantasy.  We’re just going to have to endure until the storm fades away and normal service through the sector can resume.

“It has,” he said.  He poured drinks for both of them, careful to honour Yasuke’s tastes.  The Alphan wouldn’t be impressed if he mixed them up.  His race was so used to standing on ceremony that a single mistake could offend them beyond the point of reason.  Besides, it was just rude.  “Have you had any trouble remaining in touch with your homeworld?”

Yasuke didn’t seem surprised by the question, although it was never easy to read his face.  Abraham had studied, as best as he could, and even he - and Nancy - found it hard to know what their former masters were thinking.  Yasuke had to be irked at being effectively downgraded to Ambassador, after being Viceroy, but he’d never shown it.  Perhaps the rumours were true and Yasuke’s career was effectively at an end, after the part he’d played in granting Earth independence.  His superiors might regard him as an embarrassment, one better kept hundreds of light years from home.  Abraham hoped that wasn’t true.  The post was important, damn it.

 “I’ve had to bounce messages the long way around, but so far contact hasn’t been cut completely,” Yasuke said.  There was no hint of concern in his tone.  “So far, there has been no formal response to the storm.”

“The reports do suggest it hasn’t entered your territory,” Abraham said, probing.  “Do you think that is going to change?”

“We don’t know.”  Yasuke’s face didn’t move, but Abraham thought he heard a hint of irritation in Yasuke’s voice.  “Our working assumption is that the core worlds will not be threatened.”

“I hope you’re right,” Abraham said.  The long-range scans had been inconclusive.  The storm was dangerously unpredictable and that was all there was to it.  “We do have to address the issue of our current contracts and their renewals.”

Yasuke said nothing for a long moment.  Abraham wondered what, if any, instructions he’d been given.  His government seemed determined to wash its hands of the former protectorates, rather than do anything to help.  Abraham understood the impulse, but ... there were limits.  Earth would be in a far stronger position if she’d been allowed to develop naturally, rather than having her development shaped by an alien power.  There were so many gaps in the production chain that it would take years to build up a completely independent industrial base.

“My government’s position is that we will do our best to honour the current contacts,” Yasuke said, finally.  “Right now, we cannot discuss renewals.”

Abraham frowned.  “Our corporations are depending on those contracts,” he said.  “If you are unwilling to renew them, we’ll have to look elsewhere.”

“We are aware,” Yasuke said.  He shifted, slightly.  “The fact remains, however, that my government is currently unwilling to discuss renewals.”

“Your government left us with a serious problem,” Abraham said.  It was hard to keep the anger out of his voice.  “We need your help to fix it.”

“We are aware.”  Yasuke echoed his earlier words.  “The fact remains, as I said, that my government is currently unwilling to discuss renewals.”

Abraham studied the alien face, his mind racing.  Yasuke wouldn’t repeat himself without a very good reason.  “Why?”

“I do not know.”  Yasuke took a sip of his drink.  “But, right now, they are unwilling to make any future commitments of any sort.”

And if they haven’t told you what’s going on, Abraham thought, what the hell is going on?

He forced himself to think.  The Alphans had taken a beating in the war.  Had the damage been worse than they’d admitted?  It was possible.  They’d lost a sizable number of warcruisers, ships that simply couldn’t be replaced in a hurry.  And ... somehow, they’d also lost the determination that had driven them to build the greatest empire the galaxy had ever seen.  They’d been withdrawing to their core worlds since the end of the war.  Perhaps the refusal to discuss future commitments was a tacit admission that their time was over, that they were no longer interested in galactic affairs.  Abraham shivered as he contemplated a galaxy without them.  If the Alphans didn’t enforce the rules, who would?

“We are prepared to pay premium rates,” he said, quietly.  “And even to provide the shipping ourselves.”

“I will forward your suggestions to my government,” Yasuke said.  “But my feeling is that they’ll refuse to change their new policy.”

And you wouldn’t have said that unless you were sure it was true, Abraham thought, coldly.  Ambassadors didn’t have that much freedom.  What’s going on, behind the storm?

He took a breath.  “I need to ask you another question, off the record,” he said.  “Can we count on your government’s support if we face a major threat?”

“I do not believe so,” Yasuke said.  “The truth is, we have spent centuries maintaining galactic harmony.  We have done so at severe cost and little gain to ourselves.  Now ... we are simply unable to meet the demands of galactic harmony.  My government has largely decided not to attempt to influence events outside our borders.”

Abraham blinked.  Yasuke was being oddly blunt, for an Alphan.  And ...  “Five years ago, we were inside your borders.”

Yasuke said nothing for a long, cold moment.  “And then you asked us to leave.”

His voice was calm, but it still stung.  Abraham gritted his teeth to keep from saying something thoroughly undiplomatic.  Earth had been a province of the mighty empire.  It hadn’t been given a choice.  Of course humans had wanted to climb to the top, to prove they were equals ... they’d never considered that the Alphans might cut their losses and leave.  They’d assumed they’d be granted equality or autonomy, not independence.  And yet ...

“You gained much from maintaining galactic law and order,” Abraham pointed out, stiffly.  “And now you are abandoning it?”

“Fifty years ago, we could police the galaxy with impunity,” Yasuke countered.  “Now ... we cannot impose ourselves on the other races.”

That, Abraham reflected, was probably true.  Alphan supremacy had died with the warcruisers that had been swarmed and destroyed during the war.  If the relatively primitive Lupines had come so close to defeating the Alphans in open battle, what would happen if the Alphans faced a true galactic power?  They might lose the war ... or they might win a victory at such a cost as to render the victory meaningless.  The days when they could push the other races around were over.  They might crush one enemy only to be attacked by a dozen others.

“We didn’t need anything from the other races,” Yasuke added, as if he were aware of Abraham’s thoughts.  “We could impose our will on them relatively cheaply.  Now ... we can’t.”

“I see,” Abraham said.  He remembered the theory the Alphans had somehow created the storm and shivered.  They certainly had a motive, but ... he shook his head.  Power on that scale was far beyond them.  “Do you believe there is any chance the contracts will be renewed, when they finally expire?”

“That is a matter for my government and the trade combines,” Yasuke said.  “But my personal feeling is that there will be no renewals.”

Abraham cursed under his breath.  Earth wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for the Alphans.  God knew they hadn’t had to pull out so quickly.  And yet ... perhaps it had been inevitable.  The Alphans could not have offered either complete autonomy or equality.  Their only real choice had been to pull out and let the successor government stand or fall on its own.

They can’t push the rest of the universe around any longer, he thought.  So they’re taking their toys and going home.

It was unfair, he knew, but he clung to the bitterness anyway.  The Alphans had been the undisputed masters of the known universe because they’d had both the power and will to enforce their laws.  Even the other Galactics had hesitated to risk breaking them, fearing the punishment that would be meted out.  And yet, as the others had grown more powerful, the galaxy had grown less and less certain there would be punishment.  Abraham understood, all too well.  It was easy to bully a single-star system.  It was a great deal harder to do the same to a multistar power with near-equal tech.  

He sipped his drink, wishing the interview was over.  He should have left it to the diplomats, although - as the former Viceroy - Yasuke had the right to speak directly to the Head of State.  The whole meeting had been nothing more than a waste of time, yielding only one piece of data.  If the contracts were not going to be renewed ...

This is going to be bad, he thought, numbly.   We have quite enough problems already.

He took a breath.  “Can we purchase industrial tools from you?”

Yasuke showed no visible reaction.  “We cannot offer you any ongoing contracts.”

“No,” Abraham agreed.  “But you could sell us the tools so we could make things for ourselves, rather than the finished products.  It would be a one-off sale, rather than an ongoing contract.”

The alien seemed to hesitate.  Abraham braced himself.  It was the sort of discussion that should be had at a lower level and to hell with Alphan protocol.  The diplomats should have asked the question, not him.  And yet, the fact it was he who was asking should underline, even for them, just how important the issue was.  The Alphans weren’t a dishonourable race, and if they felt guilty over their role in the growing crisis ...

Yasuke shifted.  “I will have to consult my superiors,” he said, slowly.  “Perhaps you could put together a list of your requirements and forward it to my office.”

Abraham felt a twinge of hope.  “It would be my pleasure,” he said.  He’d have to consult with his council first, to sort out what they needed and what they were likely to get, but it could be done.  “And I hope your government will look kindly on it.”

“I hope so too,” Yasuke said.  “But I can make no promises.”

***

There was no way, Yasuke thought, as the meeting devolved into mindless banalities, that he could make any promises.  He was not in favour back home, not after pushing for humanity’s independence.  There was no disguising the fact that the withdrawal had caused problems that were still plaguing the empire, or that the concessions had led - inevitably - to demands for more concessions.  The Alphan Empire was still strong, still capable of giving any challengers a bloody nose, but it no longer had the will to defend itself.  The population no longer wanted to serve in the military, let alone bring civilisation to the rest of the galaxy; the population was too busy enjoying themselves, while all the difficult and dirty jobs were handled by alien guest workers who were steadily growing into a major problem.  And the political will to handle the issue simply wasn’t there.

He exchanged polite farewells with the First Speaker, then allowed a servant to lead him back to his flyer.  The man was no diplomat.  He was untrained in the formalities of galactic diplomacy.  And yet ... Yasuke knew humans better than he’d ever admitted.  The idea of studying an alien race, particularly a servant race, was strange to his people, but he’d studied humanity ever since his arrival on Earth.  Abraham’s frustration, and fear for the future, had been all too evident.  The human race was caught between too many galactic powers, all of whom wanted to become the galactic superpower.  Yasuke feared it was just a matter of time before hostilities broke out.  Everyone was preparing for war.

Which raises the question of just how much we can help, he reflected.  And how much the government is willing to do.

It wasn’t a pleasant thought.  The government’s official position was that anything taking place outside the borders was no longer their problem.  They were abandoning bases and evacuating colony worlds and warning their people that anyone who remained on the wrong side of the border would no longer enjoy the military’s protection.  The government would honour its contracts - the empire had been built on the rule of law - but when the time came to renew them it would refuse.  And then, humanity would be alone.  There was no one else who could and would sell them what they needed.  The Galactics didn’t want more rivals.

Nor do we, he thought.  And that is the problem, isn’t it?

He stared at the city below, his thoughts churning.  The human race was almost revoltingly ingenious.  In hindsight, perhaps it had been a mistake to catalogue them as a stage-one race when the survey ship had stumbled across humanity.  Humans had taken what they were given, right from the start, and found ways to use it that had surprised their masters.  It was just a matter of time, he was sure, before humans mastered the most advanced technologies and started to improve upon them.  And then ... what?  Yasuke wasn’t blind to the whispered concerns of his political masters.  If humanity became a galactic superpower, what would that mean for the empire?  Would the human race seek revenge?

They want us to sell them industrial tech, he reminded himself.  And that may turn them into a very real threat.

The thought tormented him.  The empire had decreed, centuries ago, that certain technologies would only be produced within the core worlds.  The colonies and protectorates would never be allowed to advance past a certain point, ensuring a permanent market for the core while making it difficult for the protectorates to demand greater autonomy or independence.  Earth had been living proof, once upon a time, of the wisdom of that policy.  If humanity could start churning out better freighters than their masters, what could they do if they had access to first-grade military technology?  How long would it be until they produced warcruisers of their very own?

And yet, the empire was in retreat.  It wasn’t even offering to sell the humans what they needed at a fair price.  And that meant ...

They might become a threat, he thought.  But right now, they’re the ones under threat.

The flyer landed on the embassy roof.  Yasuke disembarked, stepped through the security gate and made his way down to his office.  There weren’t many Alphans left on the planet and almost all of them resided in the embassy, a reminder that the galaxy was no longer under their sway.  Once, he’d had a staff of humans under his command ... now, he couldn’t recruit humans for fear they’d be spying for their government.  It wasn’t a pleasant thought.  What did it say about his people that it was hard to recruit even a handful of embassy staffers?  He snapped orders at his assistant, asking him to open a direct channel to the council back home.  There was no point in trying to start matters rolling without their consent.  It would be just another nail in his political coffin.

He waited, impatiently.  The storm was making direct communication difficult, but not that difficult.  It was a grim reminder that he was no longer considered important, that whatever happened on - or to - Earth was no longer considered important either.  The council should have answered the call at once - at the very least, a councillor should have taken his call and laid the groundwork to address the full council - but now ...who knew when they’d answer, if they ever would?  He feared the worst.  Once, he’d been important.  Now, his superiors were probably hoping he’d retire and step into obscurity.  He was a reminder of a past they wanted to forget.

Tapping his terminal, he started to put together his proposal as he waited.  The council might not care for the idea of selling Earth advanced technology, but he could sell it to them as vital for interstellar security.  If the human race was crushed, or forced to ally with a different galactic superpower, it would threaten the safety of the empire itself.  Better to have a friendly power on the border, particularly one not capable of posing a lethal threat, than a hostile power that indisputably could.  The council might not like him, and it might not care about human problems, but it couldn’t deny the logic.  Shoring up humanity’s position would make a great deal of sense in the long run.

The terminal bleeped.  It was time.

Yasuke took a breath and began.

Chapter Nine

Theta Sigma, Occupied Zone

The Theta Sigma System had never been considered particularly important, certainly not by the galactic superpowers.  The G2 star was orbited by four rocky worlds, only one remotely habitable, and a handful of asteroids that were not, as far as the Galactics were concerned, worth the effort of establishing a mining station.  The sole inhabitable world was on the edge of the habitable zone and, as there were quite a few other more hospitable worlds within a dozen light years, had been largely ignored by the major races.  The lesser races had moved in and, over the years, built up a surprisingly diverse collection of settlements and industrial habitats.  The Vulteks had laid claim to the system, as part of their expansion, but they’d done nothing beyond establishing a settlement.  The system had barely noticed the war, let alone its transfer to human authority.  The local population simply didn’t care.

Naomi frowned as Dauntless passed through the crossroads and slipped into realspace.  The system was surprisingly active, with hundreds of starships and interplanetary ships making their way to and from the crossroads, but there was very little human presence within sensor range.  The files had said as much - she’d studied them during the voyage - yet she couldn’t help thinking it boded ill.  There didn’t seem to be any effective government within the system.  It wasn’t really a surprise, but it worried her.  If humanity couldn’t impose order, someone else might try.

Admiral Glass was right to worry, she thought, as she gave orders for the convoy to head to Theta Sigma itself.  This system is a sitting duck.

Her impression didn’t change as they glided towards the planet.  Theta Sigma itself - the locals couldn’t agree on a name, according to the files - was a patchy world that reminded her of Mars, although the planet hadn’t needed so much terraforming to make the atmosphere breathable.  The surface was covered in swathes of green and yellow, as if a child had taken a paintbrush to the sphere ... it struck her, as she watched the display, that the patches of green and yellow had to be immense if they were visible from space.  The files stated there was little law and order on the surface, let alone the high orbitals.  Each settlement was practically a world unto itself.  She wondered, idly, why the officer on the spot hadn’t tried to impose order.  It was his bloody job.

He probably doesn’t have the firepower, she reminded herself.  And he has an entire sector to patrol.

The sense of unease grew stronger as more and more data flowed into the display.  There was no control, no overall command authority.  The starships came and went without so much as announcing themselves to the system’s legal owners.  It was never easy to establish authority - Earth’s history stood as mute testament to the simple fact that political power often came out of the barrel of a gun - but it looked as if the admiral in command hadn’t even tried.  And yet, with only four starships on permanent station, it would only provoke resistance, which would draw in the other interstellar powers.  They were just waiting for an excuse to take the occupied zone for themselves.  She feared humanity was on a fool’s errand.

Her eyes traced the starships in orbit.  Human vessels, alien vessels ... she frowned as she spotted a pair of Pashtali ships, holding station far too close to the naval base for comfort.  They looked like freighters, but it was impossible to be sure.  The ships could easily be warships built on freighter hulls, if they weren’t simply spies.  She wondered, as the convoy slipped into orbit, just how long the Pashtali ships had been there.  The local commander hadn’t tried to order them to leave.

And sending in an inspection team would be sure to provoke a diplomatic incident, she reflected, grimly.  They might even be hoping the admiral will do just that, so they can use it as an excuse to start a war.

“Captain,” Lieutenant Wood said.  “Admiral Chung sends his compliments, and invites you to join him for dinner at 1900.”

Naomi nodded, curtly.  Her official orders said she’d be making a sweep through the sector before heading back to Earth.  The unofficial orders, the orders she’d been given personally, were very different.  She grimaced as she looked at the display.  Admiral Chung was going to be pissed that he’d been left out of the loop, even though he had no need-to-know.  Admiral Glass had placed her in an awkward position.  And yet, looking at the planet, it was easy to accept Admiral Glass was right.  There was no way in hell the local HQ could be considered secure.

“Janet, take command and ensure the freighters are passed to local control,” she ordered, putting her doubts aside.  1900.  She didn’t have much time to alert her shuttle pilot, let alone have a wash and get changed.  “I’ll be back as soon as possible.”

“Aye, Captain,” Janet said.  “Have fun.”

Naomi snorted as she headed for her ready room, unsure if she should change into her dress uniform.  It was a relief that the Alphan-designed uniforms had been dumped five years ago - the alien aesthetic had looked strange on human forms - yet their replacements weren’t much better.  A serving officer would understand completely if she arrived in her regular uniform, but she didn’t know Chung.  He’d served during the war, yet they’d never met.  If he took offense ... she sighed, stripped off her uniform and donned her dress whites.  There was no point in taking chances.  Chung was going to be unhappy enough when he found out she had secret orders.

She collected her terminal and sidearm - they’d been warned to remain armed at all times in this sector - and headed for the hatch.  Her shuttle was already prepared, the pilot powering up the drive as she clambered through the airlock and took her seat.  She braced herself as the shuttle undocked and glided away from the ship, then steered towards the local HQ.  It was weirdly designed, a strange combination of several different concepts.  She couldn’t help thinking of it as a giant brooding spider.

Which is probably not a good omen, she thought, wryly.  The Pashtali look like giant spiders, too.

“Captain, local control is very weak,” the pilot said.  “There doesn’t seem to be any traffic controllers directing traffic.”

“Noted.”  Naomi made a mental note to suggest Admiral Glass push for more patrol and customs vessels.  The Galactics couldn’t object to enhanced traffic control, could they?  “Make sure you put it in your report.”

She forced herself to sit back and wait as the shuttle approached the brooding structure, then docked at a simple airlock.  A pair of Marines met her on the far side, ran a sensor over her, then led her through a maze of corridors to the station’s core.  Naomi couldn’t help thinking the proportions were all wrong.  The station had clearly been designed for aliens who were larger than the average human.  She frowned inwardly as she spotted hundreds of aliens, from a dozen different races, making their way through the corridors.  Admiral Glass had definitely been right.  There was no true security on Theta Sigma.

And some of the staff are Vulteks, she thought.  How many of them hate our guts?

The thought tormented her as her escort stopped in front of a large hatch, then pressed their hands against the sensor.  The hatch opened, to reveal a large chamber that had been turned into a sitting room.  The bulkheads seemed oddly slanted, as if the chamber had been warped and twisted ... it took her a moment to realise it had originally been designed for a Pashtali.  The human furniture, and paintings on the walls, only added to the sense of unreality.  It felt as if she was stepping back in time, back to when she’d been XO to an alien commander who hadn’t known how to handle his ship ...

Admiral Chung stood and held out a hand.  “Welcome to Theta Sigma, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir,” Naomi managed.  The chamber was more than a little disconcerting.  “It’s been a long flight.”

“I understand,” Admiral Chung said.  He waved to a table.  “Please, be seated.  Dinner will be served in a moment.”

Naomi took her seat and studied the admiral thoughtfully.  He was shorter than she’d expected, with dark hair and tinted skin.  His file stated he’d grown up on an asteroid colony, rather than Earth, then spent most of his career in orbital defence and traffic control rather than starships.  She supposed it was why he’d been given the post.  He would know how to handle both freighter crews and obnoxious aliens who thought they had the right to demand priority at all times.  And yet, she was sure he wasn’t really in control.  His authority was non-existent.

“It’s been years since I set foot on Earth,” Chung said, as an alien entered the chamber, laid a tray of food on the table and retreated as silently as he’d come.  “How has it changed, in the wake of the war?  And everything else?”

“It’s hard to say,” Naomi said.  She’d spent most of her life in space.  “I think ... most people are just struggling to survive, now that we’re an independent world again.  There’s been a lot of disorientation and downsizing and other problems, but ... it’s hard to say.  We’re still a little unsure the world has actually changed.”

“Out here, they have the same impression,” Chung said.  It was impossible to miss the irritation in his tone.  “The planet may be ours, on paper, but no one convinced the locals to accept us.  They won’t do anything for us unless we pay or put guns to their heads and either way, they will never like us.  Our attempts to patrol the system and prevent smuggling, among everything else, haven’t so much as put a dent in the problem.  And it’s even worse elsewhere.”

Naomi frowned as she helped herself to the food.  The bland meat had probably come out of a vat, rather than a living animal, but - judging by the smell - the cook had done his best to flavour the stew with spices.  It was common, out in the belt.  “The reports didn’t make it sound very good.”

“No,” Chung agreed.  “In theory, we rule the sector.  In practice, we don’t really control anything under our guns, let alone elsewhere.  The Vulteks didn’t really enforce the laws - really, I think they encouraged smugglers and pirates to set up shop in their territory, because they could use the networks for their own purposes.  The threadlines aren’t particularly well charted, let alone guarded; the vast majority of the crossroads are completely unmonitored.  I don’t even begin to have enough ships to set up regular patrols and they know it.  This place” - he waved a hand at the bulkhead - “leaks like a sieve.”

“Why not set up a base elsewhere?”  Naomi leaned forward.  “Or simply put your flag on a starship?”

“It’s the only major repair facility in the sector,” Chung said.  “The Vulteks controlled it before the war.  Now, we have to use it ourselves to show we’re the new boss.”

He shook his head.  “We don’t even have the manpower to operate the base without hired hands,” he added.  “And that doesn’t really help.”

“No,” Naomi agreed.  “We don’t know how reliable they are.”

“But that isn’t even the worst of it,” Chung warned, as if she hadn’t spoken.  “Over the last three weeks, we’ve had reports of unknown warships being sighted within the sector.”

Naomi tensed.  “The Pashtali?”

“Perhaps.”  Chung took a sip of his water.  Naomi was quietly relieved to see he wasn’t drinking alcohol.  “Most of the long-range reports come from merchant ships, with civilian sensors.  They were able to tell the contacts were warships, but they weren’t able to identify them.  My staff did a detailed analysis of the records, to no avail.  We know the ships were there, but we don’t know who or why.  They sneak close enough to be detected, then withdraw as quickly as they came.”

“They’re trying to make us jumpy, sir,” Naomi said, slowly.  She recalled her first command and scowled.  “The Vulteks did the same.”

“Yes,” Chung agreed.  “The Pashtali patronised the Vulteks.  It’s possible the Vulteks learnt the trick from their masters.  It’s also possible someone else is behind the mystery contacts, hoping to start a war between us and the Pashtali.  We just don’t know, Captain, but everyone is on edge.  Right now, our authority is very flimsy.  The local governments, such as they are, are reluctant to make any sort of long-term agreements with us for fear of what the Pashtali will do.”

“And there’s no way we can protect them, if the Pashtali come calling,” Naomi said.  The files had made that very clear.  It was a shameful admission, but one she couldn’t refuse to make.  Not to herself.  “They know it.”

Chung laughed, humourlessly.  “Yes.  Of course they know it.  They can read a fleet list as easily as anyone else.  The Pashtali could roll up this sector very easily, to the point hardly anyone - including us - could offer any real resistance.  We have been denied permission to lay minefields, establish checkpoints or even set up planetary defence forces.  The best we can do is urge local governments to prepare for trouble, which most of them don’t have the resources to do ... not on the scale they need, certainly.  In short, Captain, we are going to lose very quickly if the Pashtali come over the border.  I suggest you make that clear when you report back to Earth.”

“Yes, sir,” Naomi said.  She intended to send an encrypted message once she returned to the ship.  The code was supposed to be unbreakable, relying on human cultural references that were so outdated most humans hadn’t heard of them.  Privately, she had her doubts.  One could deduce a great deal about a message if one knew the context.  “Do you have any contingency plans for war?”

“Very few.”  Chung scowled at the table.  “If they come over the border, right now, my sole realistic option is to fire a missile or two at them for the honour of the flag, then retreat as if the hounds of hell are after me.  There is just no way I can even slow them down, not unless I get permission to concentrate my forces and start laying mines, and even that will be very limited.  There are no less than seven possible attack routes for an enemy fleet, if they want to come here.  I can’t hope to block them all and, even if I did, it wouldn’t take them long to pick their way through multispace and get here anyway.”

Naomi winced in sympathy.  It was rare to hear an admiral unburdening himself like that, certainly not to a junior officer.  She doubted things were that different in system command, even if it wasn’t uncommon for an officer to spend much of his career in a single place.  But then, Admiral Chung knew she wouldn’t have been given her command if she didn’t have the respect of people in high places.  He could be hoping she’d take his words to Admiral Glass ... she winced, again.  Admiral Glass already knew Chung needed reinforcements.  There just wasn’t anything he could send, not without weakening the other defences.  The deployment wasn’t going to end well.

“They may not be interested in the occupied zone,” she mused.  She was clutching at straws and she knew it.  Even if the Pashtali didn’t care about the zone, they needed to control it to deny it to everyone else.  “They do have other enemies.”

“In the short term, this sector will be a drain on anyone who holds it,” Admiral Chung agreed, grimly.  “Long-term, given enough time, the sector will be extremely useful.  There’s a great many building blocks within the sector, from a trained population to natural resources, that would turn the sector into the jewel in someone’s crown.  But a lot depends on how long we get to keep it.  The Pashtali can afford to take it off us, then patrol the sector long enough to establish themselves as the bosses.  They would get the reward.”

“Five hundred years ago, Earth would have looked useless too,” Naomi agreed.  She’d watched an alternate history movie once, based on the writer’s concept of what would have happened if Earth had never become part of the Alphan Empire.  The writer’s ignorance had been so obvious nothing, not even a pair of stunning performances, could hide it from the general public.  “And we became a jewel in the empire’s crown.”

“Quite,” Admiral Chung agreed.  “This sector is a seed, a whole field seeded with potential.  Whoever owns the field will inherit whatever grows from it.”

Unless someone bigger and nastier comes along and takes it from the farmer, Naomi thought.  No one wants to invest for fear their investment will be stolen from them.

She nodded as she finished her meal.  “I have to depart tomorrow,” she said.  There was no time for shore leave.  If she really had intended to fly straight back to Earth, her crew would not have been happy.  Hell, she wouldn’t have been happy either.  “But I’ll make sure to take your concerns to my superiors.”

“Please,” Admiral Chung said.  He sounded tired, tired and beaten before the first shot was fired.  “Right now, it’s only a matter of time before something happens and things fall apart.  The mystery warships, smugglers and pirates, everything else ... it’ll just take one incident to start a war.  And if that happens, we’re finished.”

“Yes, sir,” Naomi said.  “I’ll make sure they understand.”

DOWNLOAD THE FULL STORY NOW!
https://books2read.com/u/3JZNkP
https://bookgoodies.com/a/B09MKXKG62