PART I:
Voyage Into Darkness
Cassandra
Outworld Coalition Forward Headquarters on the planet K’tok
Over one hundred fifty light years from Earth
15 July 2134 (five months after Incident Seventeen)
“First you bedded him, then you broke his heart, and now you want to know more about him? Commander, you might rethink the order in which you do stuff.”
The words, delivered in Lieutenant Moe Rice’s deliberate west Texas drawl, momentarily left Cassandra as empty of breath as would a blow to the midsection. Commander Cassandra Atwater-Jones, Royal Navy, stared across her desk at the man who over the last months had become her friend as well as colleague and subordinate. Glared at him was probably more like it, the only way she knew to mask her grief and regret. Rice, a US Navy officer of considerable size and dark visage, returned her gaze unblinkingly. Of course he did: he was right—not that she was prepared to acknowledge that.
When she spoke, she made her voice hard.
“Leftenant Rice, my interest in Captain Bitka’s command style is professional, as you very well know. He has been missing for five months and it seems as if every admiral in the Outworld Coalition insists that our working group list him as dead, and his command lost due to hostile acts of the uBakai Star Navy. The manner in which his ship disappeared is reminiscent of the uBakai jump scrambler weapon—”
“’Cept it didn’t destroy his ship,” Rice cut in.
“We don’t know that!” she answered, her own voice rising. She stopped and took a breath and closed her eyes for a moment.
“What do we know about Incident Seventeen?” she said when she felt she could keep her voice from trembling. “On nineteen February last, a shuttle-sized craft emerged from jump space in this star system between the orbits of K’tok and Mogo. It emitted radiation on wavelengths consistent with a sensor sweep, made a single powerful burst transmission directly at the closest vessel, and then destroyed itself. The nearby vessel was USS Cam Ranh Bay, of which ship Bitka had taken command seven days prior. Bitka’s ship jumped almost simultaneous with the transmission. But it did not emerge from J-space at Eeee’ktaa, its intended destination nor, so far as we can determine, has it turned up anywhere else in known space.
“Where did it go? What was its fate? Who was responsible?”
“I know the damned questions, Commander,” Rice grumbled as he shifted in his chair. “Just don’t know any answers.”
Normally Cassandra liked looking at his face, the whites of his eyes so white they were almost blue, set in a face the color of weathered and blackened bronze. Instead she turned to the third person in her office, more as an excuse to look away from Rice without it appearing quite so much like an admission of guilt. Vice-Captain Takaar Nuvaash of the uBakai Star Navy was clearly embarrassed by the exchange, an emotion easy to spot on most Varoki: the broad ears folded tightly back against the head, the hairless iridescent skin flushed pink, or sometimes a bit orange if the Varoki in question was also offended. The common Human epithet for Varoki—leatherhead—did them a disservice, she thought. There was something exquisite in the way the light played across their softly textured skin, colors coming and going as if through a kaleidoscope,
Like Cassandra, Nuvaash was a military intelligence officer—what most Varoki navies called “Speaker for The Enemy.” Like her, Moe Rice, and seven other officers from four different Earth nations, he was part of the Incident Seventeen Working Group, although in his case the assignment was unofficial. It had to be as, unlike Cassandra and the others, he was a Varoki and a prisoner of war, their prisoner. Ironically, he was the only one apart from Moe Rice she felt she could really trust, which was a sad commentary on how tangled and toxic the politics of this entire incident had become. She turned back to Rice.
“I am due to meet with the new station commander in half an hour to brief him on our progress. You know his identity?”
Rice grimaced before answering. “Rear Admiral Jacob Goldjune.”
“Yes, Rear Admiral Jacob Goldjune, brother of Admiral Cedric Goldjune, our coalition’s CNO.” She turned to Nuvaash. “Chief of Naval Operations, what you would call the Fleet-Guiding Admiral. He is the most visible advocate for restarting hostilities with your nation.” She turned back to Rice. “Our new commander is also the father of Larry Goldjune, who now commands USS Puebla, Bitka’s former boat. Wasn’t there bad blood between Bitka and young Goldjune?”
Rice laughed but without a trace of humor. Yes, of course there was, she thought. Trust Bitka to pick a fight with the scion of the most powerful and well-connected family in the Navy of the United States of North America.
“Excuse me,” Nuvaash said, “but I am confused. The Goldjunes are brothers? Father and son? I do not understand.”
“There are three of them,” Cassandra said. “Here, let me draw you a picture.” She picked up a stylus from her desk holder, drew briefly on the smart surface of her desk, and then tapped the output control. A wafer of thin flexible composite emerged from the output slot. She checked it and handed it to Nuvaash.
“Ah,” he said, “Very clear. But Captain Bitka was a successful warrior and they are all members of the same navy. Why do they dislike him?”
Cassandra looked at him and fought down a surge of irritation. “Don’t be coy with me, Nuvaash. You are not so callow as all that, and I am not in the mood for games.” She turned back to Rice. “So what sort of reception do you expect me to receive in this upcoming meeting?”
“I’d wear body armor if I was you,” Rice said, but he smiled at her, the bleak smile of condemned prisoners sharing the same cell. “Okay, you want to know what kind of cap’n Bitka was? He never gave up. Never. He relied on his crew, got us to do impossible things, I still don’t know how. Somehow made us believe we could do it, and then it turned out we really could.”
He paused and thought for a moment.
“Couldn’t abide dishonesty. I guess that’s what got him so pissed off at Larry Goldjune and his uncle Cedric, the big admiral. That last part got him a share of trouble. Still don’t know how he got out of that court martial, although I bet you do. I ain’t asking, but if you had a part in it, I thank you.”
Cassandra nodded, and then Nuvaash spoke.
“Your Captain Bitka reminds me of the archetypal trickster in so many of your Human myths and legends. He never met my admiral but he had an uncanny ability to know exactly what it would take to draw him away from K’tok at the final battle.”
Rice shook his head. “Might have looked that way from your side, but the truth is it was just a shot in the dark. Cap’n figured a long shot was better than no shot at all. That’s what I mean—the son of a bitch never gives up.”
He looked at her, a look full of meaning which she immediately understood. Were the roles reversed, Bitka would not have given up on her by now, would he? No. But she was not Sam Bitka. Listening to Rice made her almost believe he might still be alive, but that was absurd. Realistically the only riddles were how and where he had died, not if, and answering those questions would do nothing to fill the aching void in her heart.
Still, if their working group filed a report declaring him dead and suggesting uBakai culpability, it would be all the excuse the war faction—including the assorted Goldjunes—would need to renounce the fragile ceasefire and restart hostilities, which could rip the Stellar Commonwealth—the Cottohazz—apart. Unfortunately, what little evidence there was pointed to the uBakai. Once the investigation stopped, that’s all the evidence there would be, and once Bitka and his crew were declared dead, the investigation would be quickly wrapped up.
Bitka had fought so hard, and risked so much, to get them to this fragile peace. She owed it to him to hold the peace together, however and for as long as she could, and if that meant keeping him officially alive, well then so be it. She touched the desktop hologram of her daughter and then stood up.
“Time for me to go if I am not to keep our new admiral waiting.”
“Shirtsleeve order?” Rice asked, looking her over. “You at least going to put on a jacket to meet the big brass?”
Cassandra glanced down at her white short-sleeved uniform blouse and blue slacks.
“No, I think this will do. Remember what Ibsen said: ‘Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for truth and freedom.’ Now, where’s my hat?”
The bulldog-faced American yeoman manning the reception desk touched his ear, listened to whatever was coming through his surgically embedded commlink, and looked up at her.
“The admiral will see you now, ma’am. Go right in.”
Cassandra rose, tucked her hat under her arm, and crossed the carpeted anteroom to the dark wood-grained door bearing the plaque which read, in glowing letters, “Rear Admiral Jacob Goldjune, Commander, K’tok Base Area.” She pressed the entry panel, the door whispered to the side, and she strode across the polished hardwood floor and came to attention in front of the admiral’s desk. His office was a much larger version of her own, with the addition of a broad window behind the admiral looking out over T’tokl-Heem, the occupied Varoki capital of K’tok. In the background, K’tok Needle, the elevator to orbit, rose from behind the downstation complex, impossibly tall and slender, gleaming golden in the morning sunlight. As she watched, a cigar-shaped cargo capsule began its silent magnetically-induced acceleration up the needle to orbit.
“Commander Atwater-Jones, reporting as ordered, sir.”
She noticed that Admiral Goldjune, his attention on the open files displayed on the smart surface of his desk, wore shirtsleeve order, the same as her.
Nice to know I’m not underdressed for the ball.
He glanced up at her.
“Be seated, commander.”
She did so, trying to form an impression of the man. Blonde, balding, heavy, his accent soft and southern, the sort she had heard quite often in Mississippi when she had been there on an exchange course. He had an intelligent face, not what she would call forceful or determined, but not really weak either. Guarded, she thought. Well, in military intelligence one got used to dealing with guarded faces and guarded minds. But there was something else in his face. Melancholy. That surprised her. Before he spoke he slid several open virtual folders into the center of his desk, studied them for a moment, and his mouth turned down in a frown.
“So, naval intelligence, huh?” he said looking up at her. “You were on Admiral Kayumati’s staff, on board Pensacola when she took that fire lance hit that tore her in half. Lucky to survive that one.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, and despite herself she shuddered at the memory, at the day spent in the dark claustrophobic isolation of an escape pod, feeling her fingers and toes begin to freeze, giving up hope of rescue, and then suddenly safe again aboard HMS Exeter.
“Sorry if that’s an awkward subject,” the admiral said. Cassandra looked up, remembered where she was.
“Quite all right, sir. I certainly wasn’t the only one who had some anxious moments that day. Most of the others on Pensacola, and the other ships in the task force, were less fortunate than I.”
“Uh-huh. I lost about a half-dozen old friends that day, and a couple old enemies I miss near as much. Navies are like that, aren’t they? Like a family, including the fact you don’t get to pick ’em.”
He looked away and shook his head as if trying to clear it of his own memories.
“Commander, I’m trying to catch up on what’s what in this command. I know we’ve had to do a peck of improvising these last few months, but that’s no excuse for sloppy work.”
“Yes, sir, I quite agree.”
“Huh. You know, this whole Incident Seventeen business—USS Cam Ranh Bay disappearing just when that mysterious jump missile showed up and gave a burst transmission, then melted—that can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
“I do not believe so, sir.”
“Wonder what it is then. I got a dispatch here from the CNO,” he said, tapping one of the open documents before him. “It was waiting for me when I got here yesterday. It says to light a fire under you and get a final report out of your working group. How long you been at this?
Cassandra had been expecting this. She and Rice—and Nuvaash to an extent—had done everything they could to prolong the investigation, but they had been reduced to redoing old work. Even some of the other members of the working group were becoming impatient and suspicious.
“Just past four months now, sir,” she answered.
The admiral leaned back in his chair and his frown deepened. “Hell, the shooting didn’t last half that long. Now we can’t find one measly little transport that’s gone missing? I wonder if it would have riled as much if anyone else had been in command but Bitka. Most successful fighting captain we had in the war, and some idiot gives him a transport? ‘Bow-on Bitka,’ they called him, but you must have known that.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. She felt no need to tell him how thoroughly Bitka had loathed that nickname, but remembering it brought a sudden tightness to her chest and her throat.
“He fought in twice as many battles as any other surviving captain in the fleet,” the admiral continued, “and he was probably the least decorated. What do you make of that, Commander?”
“I . . . I don’t believe it is my place to comment on the awards policy of your service—”
“Travesty, that’s what it is” the admiral said, cutting her off, “and I don’t give a good goddamn what he said about my brother, the CNO. From what I can tell, Bitka should have the Medal of Honor, along with Bonaventure and that other one they gave it to. They didn’t even give Bitka the Navy Cross! Does that seem right to you?”
“I . . . really, Admiral Goldjune, I don’t feel—”
“All right,” he said and looked away for a moment, his thoughts elsewhere, before resuming. “You know, when I was still head of BuShips I received a report from him. That was right before all this happened. His recommendations on design improvements in the next group of destroyer riders, assuming we decide to build any more. I imagine you had a hand in that report.”
“Only to correct his spelling, sir. The thinking was entirely his own.”
“Huh. He had a head on his shoulders, I’ll give him that. Wonder if he still does. Well, as to that, I have been looking over your interim progress reports. So has the CNO, by the way. That would be my brother? You re-interviewed every witness. You had to pull three of them back from Earth rotation, which took a few weeks right there. Didn’t come up with one single new thing. The CNO thinks you’re dragging your feet, doing the work over and over, trying to put off filing a final report.”
Cassandra felt her face redden.
“I assure you, sir—”
“Sloppy,” he said with a shake of his head. He sat back in his chair, expression unreadable.
“Sir?”
He tilted his head back and examined her as if through spectacles, eyes narrowing in appraisal. She thought she saw a flicker of a smile as well, although that seemed unlikely under the circumstances.
“All those re-interviews and you didn’t come up with a single new insight? You weren’t looking hard enough, Commander. I told you I won’t stand for sloppy work.”
Cassandra felt a renewed surge of anxiety. The admiral could simply relieve her and replace her with Korvetenkapitän Heidegger of the Deutsche Sternmarine, the next senior officer in her working group. Heidegger would be happy to pronounce Bitka dead and get back to his other duties.
“I’m very sorry sir, but—”
“Re-interview ’em.”
Cassandra wasn’t sure she understood him at first.
“Sir?”
“You heard me. Re-interview every single witness. This time do it right. There has to be something you missed.”
Cassandra stared at him, trying to sort out what that meant. Most of the witnesses had rotated outsystem. In would take weeks to recontact them, at least another month, perhaps two, to bring them here and conduct the interviews. He was ordering her to do exactly what she most wanted to do. Was this some sort of trap?
The admiral leaned forward, folded his hands on his desk, and looked her in the eye.
“Commander, if we’re going to do this—and we are going to do this—then let’s by God do it right. If anyone gives you any trouble, you direct them to my office. Do you understand me?”
Oh, she had been blind and stupid! Yes, he was the CNO’s brother, but as he had said, one doesn’t get to pick one’s family, does one?
“I think I am beginning to understand, sir.”
“Good. Good. Now while you’re lining all that up, you may have some down time. I looked over the intercepted code of the burst transmission from the unknown jump missile—basically a bunch of gibberish.”
That surprised her as well. He had actually read the technical annexes instead of just the executive summary? What sort of admiral was this man? “I am certain the code means something to someone, sir. We simply have not been able to decode it.”
“But we already agreed that missile’s transmission and Cam Ranh Bay jumping away wasn’t a coincidence,” he said. “That means the jump drive on Bitka’s ship must have been able to decode that transmission. Doesn’t that excite your curiosity?”
Cassandra leaned forward in her chair and for the first time smiled. “Admiral, I would murder to find out why that was so, but up to now our investigation has, under strict orders from above, been confined to a few very limited topics. We have been empowered to investigate all known uBakai encryption systems to see if any one of them share any features with this code. They do not. Since our jump drives are all Varoki manufactured, this makes it difficult to imagine how the code could even have affected the jump drive, since we have a fairly good idea of what the jump drive control code sequences look like.”
“Well, might be there’s another code, down under the Varoki operating systems,” the admiral said, “something real different, weird even. Alien.”
Cassandra sat back and studied the admiral. Alien? Well of course, the Varoki were aliens, but that couldn’t have been what he meant. He had a look that said she was supposed to understand there was more to what he knew than what he could say. But what?
“I wonder, sir, if you have any suggestions as to how we might go about discovering such an underlying code?”
“Got to go out and look for it. Open your commlink, Commander, and I’ll give you a data dump.”
He squinted his eyes, working through the visual menu for his own surgically embedded commlink, and then Cassandra felt a faint vibration at the base of her skull indicating a successful data transfer.
“That’s orbital telemetry,” he explained, “for the jump drive module of the uBakai cruiser KBk Four-Two-Nine. They jettisoned that jump drive after its containment system was breached in the First Battle of K’tok, last December. When the uBakai pulled all their remaining starships out of the system, Four-Two-Nine was stranded in the outer belts without a jump drive. They surrendered after disabling their weapons and wiping the code ciphers, but their log was still intact. We were able to calculate the trajectory of the jump module.”
We? she wondered. So this was not simply one admiral with an axe to grind against his more-successful brother.
“Our new orbital sensor platform found it,” he continued, “drifting on a course will probably take it clear out of the star system in another year or two.”
“But admiral, if the jump drive module was compromised as you say, the anti-tamper system was activated. Otherwise they would not have jettisoned it.”
“Oh, you know about that? Well, ’course you do. Some sort of cloud of microscopic particles, eats through any soft seal we know of, including vacuum suits, and also contains an anaerobic neurotoxin—fatal, but not quick nor pretty. You get any sort of containment breach on the jump core, that cloud gets out and the only way to save your ship is to eject the whole module, and I mean right quick.
“But you know what? I been doing some reading too and I can’t find any record of a busted drive module that’s been around in hard vacuum for more than a few weeks. Usually the Varoki just give them a real hard shove into a star or a big-old gas giant—easiest way to make sure they’re destroyed without anyone risking contamination. But this thing’s been floatin’ out there in the cold and dark for over seven months. I wonder if all that neurotoxin cloud is still active. I wonder if maybe it froze or just dispersed by now. It can’t live forever, can it?”
Cassandra felt herself tense, but not with fear, with anticipation. Her mind raced with the possibilities. If they could just look inside a jump drive module, just see how it worked . . . yes, they might find the answer to what happened to Bitka, and answers to so many other questions as well. But the cold part of her brain, the one trained in military intelligence, remained unconvinced.
“Admiral, given how jealously the Varoki guard the secret of the jump drive, why haven’t they recovered it? Either the ships of the uBakai Star Navy which were here, or a factory charter since the ceasefire?”
He nodded in agreement.
“That makes perfect sense, but war and perfect sense don’t always get along. You know, it’s only been seventy Earth years since First Contact with the Cottohazz. But before they found us that commonwealth had been around, exploring and colonizing for about two hundred years. In that whole time they never had one honest-to-God interstellar war, not until the one we just damped back down.
“Nobody is used to this. Nobody on either side was ready for it—not psychologically, anyway, and nobody knows quite what to do next. So I think what happened was a lot of things fell through the cracks. uBakai Star Navy had their hands full just staying alive—and didn’t do all that good job at it. And in all the confusion, the Varoki manufacturer, AZ Simki-Traak Transtellar, seems to have lost track of that one jump module.”
“That seems . . . unlikely, sir,” she said.
“Could be they had some help,” he said softly.
He smiled and she felt adrenaline course through her body, felt her senses sharpen and her scalp tingle. In the admiral’s smile, she suspected, was the hint of what might have been one of the most closely-guarded covert operations in human history. She knew better than to acknowledge that conclusion in any way.
“So in all that downtime you’ve got, why don’t you and your team go take a look at that module?” The admiral leaned back in his chair and said this casually, as if suggesting nothing more serious than a weekend outing. “Anyone asks, you’re checking out a large piece of debris our scanners picked up, make sure it’s not a hazard to astrogation.”
“If I might make a suggestion, sir, we could investigate it as a possible piece of wreckage from Bitka’s ship. That would explain the interest by my working group.”
“Yes, that’s better,” the admiral said. “Good thinking. Our three surviving destroyers are handling orbital security. Given the ceasefire I can get by with two for a while. Take USS Puebla, Bitka’s old boat. Go poke around and see what you can find. When you get there, though, I wouldn’t send anyone into that jump module who owed you money.”
“From what you’ve told me, sir, I would rather find a way of examining it remotely. Failing that, I suppose I have no choice but to be the first one into the module myself.”
Admiral Goldjune looked at her appraisingly. “Sounds like some of Bitka might have rubbed off on you.” He looked aside and the sadness she had seen before returned to his face. “Wish a little had rubbed off on my boy Larry.”