Barbarians at the Gates (32 page)

She grinned. “But they’re damn hard to kill. You could toss one of them into vacuum, and it wouldn’t do more than piss him off.

“Anyway, enough doom and gloom.” She reached for him and pulled him towards the bed, pushing him down and straddling him, her hands running over his chest and up towards his neck. “If you’re not going to sleep, I have something else for you to do...”

* * *

“Long night, sir?” Commander Janine Trojanskis, his executive officer, said as she offered him a mug of strong coffee.

Janine was several years older than Roman, and by all rights should’ve had her own command years ago. Yet a black mark on her record prevented her from being promoted past her current rank. Since her file was sealed, Roman had no idea what Janine might have done to annoy the Admiralty. It couldn’t have been gross incompetence; she was a good officer, he’d seen that already. Roman’s best guess was that she’d insulted an admiral in some way, and that personage must have decided that forcing her to serve under a younger man was sufficient punishment.

“Of course not,” he said, knowing all the while he was lying. Elf had told him he needed to go see the doctor to get a sleep aid, but he’d declined; the story of Captain Trautman who’d accidentally slept through the Battle of Prince’s Burg due to taking a drug to get to sleep was still well known throughout the Federation. “Ship’s status?”

“All systems functioning nominally, sir,” Janine assured him as he took the command chair. “The
Midway
is fully at your command. I stand relieved.”

“I relieve you,” Roman said, settling down into the command chair. “I suggest that you get some sleep. We’ll be in the Tranter System soon enough, and I’ll need you on the secondary bridge.”

He settled back into the command chair, took another sip of coffee, and considered the engineering reports. Janine was right—they
were
all nominal—but he always checked them himself. After two weeks of travel—first through three Asimov Points, and then crossing the inky darkness of space—it paid to be careful. If the stardrive broke down while they were traveling between star systems, they would be stranded in interstellar space. It was a spacer’s worst nightmare, apart from the Slowboaters—and they were just plain weird.

The hours ticked by slowly until
Midway
reached the mass limit and dropped down to Slower Than Light speeds. Roman knew the odds were vastly against an enemy picket ship having the sheer dumb luck to be lurking anywhere near their arrival point, but he launched a pair of stealth drones and kept
Midway
under cloak until he was sure. The Tranter System was effectively enemy territory, and discovery would force them to retreat into FTL and come at the target from another direction.

“Take us in,” he ordered. “Tactical, continue to monitor the drones. Inform me if there is the slightest hint that we’re not alone out here.”

The Tranter System was fairly typical, as star systems went, although it lacked a gas giant that could be mined for He3. It had seven rocky worlds orbiting the system primary, one of them habitable and, like many other worlds, home to an intelligent race. Roman had seen holograms of the inhabitants and it was easy to see why they were called Trolls: they were huge, ugly and given to carrying clubs and swords around wherever they went. The human settlers had used their technology to convince the Trolls that the humans were gods—a few thunderbolts had ensured they would be worshipped with fervor—and started shipping Trolls out as slave labor. It might have been against any number of laws and regulations, but Trolls made good security guards and slaves, although they didn’t possess the brainpower to handle advanced technology.

Or so the file claimed.

Personally, Roman wondered if that were actually true. The Trolls might prefer to be taken for dumb animals, only a step or two above cats and dogs. It would certainly be safer.

“Captain,” the tactical officer said sharply. “I am picking up energy signatures from AP-1!”

“Go to tactical alert,” Roman ordered calmly. Energy signatures on their own proved nothing—AP-1 was a good place to station a defense force—but if the defenders were on the alert, they might have picketed the entire system. “Can you get me a breakdown at this distance?”

There was a long pause.

“At least nine starships, all dreadnaught-sized,” the tactical officer said, finally. “They’re mounting modern scanners and tactical drives. I can’t pick up anything else at this distance.”

Roman nodded, thinking hard. The Federation Navy had only a handful of dreadnaughts in service—and none of them had been assigned to this sector. The dreadnaught design had been superseded by the superdreadnaughts, with the last dreadnaughts being built during the Inheritance Wars. After the wars, some had been sent to the Naval Reserve, while others had been decommissioned and sold as scrap. ONI had warned the Federation Navy that pirates and Outsiders were buying decommissioned ships for their own purposes, but no one had put a stop to the practice. Even a hull, without drives, weapons or sensors, was worth billions of credits.

It stood to reason that warlords would buy up every starship they could find, hiring mercenaries to help fight their wars and defend their worlds against the Federation Navy. It was rare to encounter a mercenary unit with anything larger than a heavy cruiser, but Roman couldn’t think of any reason why one
couldn’t
have nine dreadnaughts—apart from the crewing issue. A dreadnaught needed upwards of four thousand men to run effectively, although they could have modernized the ship and placed greater dependence on automated systems than the Federation Navy preferred.

Or perhaps one of the warlords had made a deal with the Outsiders and offered support in exchange for military assistance. Roman could see the sense in that, too.

“And AP-2?” Roman asked.

“Nothing, as far as I can tell,” the tactical officer said. “They don’t even have an ICN station on duty near the Asimov Point...”

“Unsurprising,” Roman commented dryly. It wasn’t as if the Marx System had anything to offer, apart from pirates and perhaps a black colony or two. The civil war that had literally destroyed the entire planet hadn’t left much behind. “Still, we will be careful. Very careful.”

Midway
slipped towards AP-2 carefully, every passive sensor alert for a prowling starship. Logically, Roman told himself, there was no reason for Governor Hartkopf’s forces to picket the Asimov Point, not when there was nothing to be gained by trying to hold it and no reason to expect anything to come out of it. On the other hand, the governor had to know that Admiral Justinian would turn on him one day and perhaps attempt to use AP-2 as a possible angle of attack. In that case, securing the Asimov Point might seem like a good idea...although there were more direct ways for Justinian to get at his enemy without a costly diversion.

“No sign of any cloaked ship,” the tactical officer reported very quietly. There was no need to speak softly—sound didn’t travel in the vacuum of space—but no one had been able to break crews of the habit. “Still...passive sensors only, sir.”

Roman nodded. Passive sensors wouldn’t give the ship away, but they also meant that
Midway’s
sensor capability was grossly reduced. A cloaked enemy ship near the Asimov Point might spot them and launch a barrage before Roman’s active sensors located her presence. It was risky, but it cut three weeks off their journey.

“Take us in,” he ordered.
Midway
glided forwards, very gingerly, as if she expected an ambush at any second. They were within the Asimov Point... “Jump.”

Space twisted around the cruiser, then they were suddenly in the Marx System.

“Report,” Roman snapped. At least missiles weren’t already being fired towards them. “Are we clear?”

“No sign of any watching picket ships, captain,” the sensor officer reported. “The system might as well be deserted.”

“Maybe,” Roman said. It would take months of searching to locate a hidden colony or starship—if the task was even remotely possible. “Helm, take us towards the first waypoint. And then we will go pay a call on The Hive.”

He smiled at their relief. If nothing else, the long trip was finally over.

“It’s time to go hunting,” he assured them. “Let’s see what we can find, shall we?”

The Brotherhood is not a banned organization. This is because of several reasons: Senators have been known to find it useful, it helps promote human unity (and therefore Federation rule) and, perhaps most importantly, no one knows half—if that—of the members of the Brotherhood. The secret society’s leaders are completely unknown. Anyone could be a Brother or Sister of Humanity. Anyone
.

-
The Dark Secrets of the Federation
, 3999

FNS
Magnificent
, Boskone System, 4095

“I understand that you sent for me, admiral?”

Marius leaned back in his chair and contemplated Commodore Arunika. She was pretty, as pretty as she’d been the day they’d first met, back before the Retribution Force had set off on its ill-fated mission. That wasn’t too surprising, considering modern anti-aging treatments—Arunika’s file claimed she was over sixty years old—but what
was
surprising was that she was still a Commodore. ONI handled promotions internally—the Promotion Board didn’t sit in judgement on Intelligence personnel—yet she should have been promoted long ago.

But then, that would have meant transferring her away from
Magnificent
. And that suggested all kinds of reasons why she might not have been promoted.

Her file had been remarkably thin, even for his clearance. Arunika had been born on Hindustan—the first world settled from India, back during the Second Expansion Era—and abandoned her caste to join the Federation Navy. She’d also abandoned her surname, a sign that she had turned her back completely on her homeworld. Hindustan wasn’t known for being very tolerant of differences and Marius had heard, from a friend who had visited the planet, that some of its citizens knew little about the Federation and cared less. Some of them might even believe they were still on Earth. Arunika, at least, had known better. ONI had snapped her up during Basic Evaluation and trained her as an analyst, before allowing her to move up in the ranks during the purge that followed the Blue Star War. And, somewhere along the way, she’d been recruited into the Brotherhood.

Marius kept his face under tight control, considering his possible options. It wasn’t common for a Brotherhood member to declare themselves openly, no matter what the situation. Arunika had probably been ordered to do so by her superiors, which suggested that part of their reasoning focused around Marius himself. The Brotherhood was supposed to have operatives and members at all levels of society—an outlook that would irritate parts of the Senate—and no one knew for sure who led the Brotherhood, if anyone did. It said something about their influence and reach that the various intelligence agencies hadn’t tracked down the Brotherhood’s leadership, although it was quite possible that the Brotherhood controlled Federation Intelligence. The Brotherhood was not exactly a banned organization, but if Marius had learned one thing in three years, it was that the Senate would respond harshly to
any
threat to their power—and they could conceivably regard the Brotherhood as a threat.

“Let’s cut right to the chase,” he said once he’d ensured that the cabin was sealed. “Why does the Brotherhood have an interest in me?”

Arunika leaned forward, her face expressionless. “What makes you think that the Brotherhood has an interest in you?”

“You’re here,” Marius countered. He had little patience for games. “You declared yourself to me—to everyone on this vessel—and you’ve stayed with me. Why would you do that unless you wanted me to know who you work for?”

“Point,” Arunika conceded with a smile. “Although I don’t actually
work
for the Brotherhood. We are more of a collective society than a top-down system. Those of us who are accepted have a say in our collective decision-making.”

And I can believe as much of that as I like
, Marius thought dryly. It seemed a cumbersome system, although perhaps it worked better in practice. The Brotherhood had been around since the First Interstellar War, and presumably had a great deal of practice in remaining underground and organizing themselves.

“But as for why we are interested in you, I would have thought that was obvious,” she added. “You’re the commanding officer of this fleet.”

“Your interest in me started before the Battle of Jefferson,” Marius pointed out. “I say again; why me?”

“You saved Earth,” Arunika explained. “That alone marked you as a person of interest. When you were appointed to the Retribution Force, we decided that it would be better if one of us accompanied you, if only to share our view of the situation.”

Marius’s eyes narrowed. “Did you know that Admiral Justinian was planning a rebellion before the Battle of Earth?”

“I’m afraid not,” Arunika admitted. “If we had known, we would have taken action to stop him before he launched his attempted coup. Sadly, Justinian and the other warlords are a symptom rather than the cause of the Federation’s problems. The Federation had been falling apart for a long time before someone decided to take advantage of its weakness.”