Stellar Fox (Castle Federation Book 2) (10 page)

Kyle heard feminine laughter coming from the bridge as he wandered down the corridor. It was roughly two hours short of when he was supposed to be on duty, but he hadn’t been able to sleep. They were only a day and a half out of Amaranthe, and while he’d never
been
there, he had history with the system.

He wasn’t entirely unused to nightmares, but that didn’t make it easier to sleep.

In the middle of the ship’s night, while under Alcubierre Drive, there were minimal demands of the watch on duty. He wasn’t overly surprised to walk in and find Commander Maria Pendez and Senior Fleet Commander Mira Solace sitting together at the navigation station with their heads together like schoolgirls.

Technically, there was supposed to be at least a Petty Officer on duty with them, but his implant had already informed him that Solace had sent Petty Officer Second Class Helena Sheach to the Infirmary with a bad case of stomach cramps.

He paused for a moment, taking in the unaccustomed sight of Solace acting like something
other
than a completely professional officer. Kyle had no idea what the two women were looking at, but it was clearly amusing both of them.

Pendez said something, causing Solace to laugh aloud, then glanced back at the door and saw Kyle. She was immediately on her feet, reaching for the uniform jacket casually thrown across her console.

“At ease, Maria,” Kyle told her with a laugh. “It’s not even five in the morning, you can relax.”

Solace stood up slightly less precipitously than her junior, but both women were on their feet facing him and he sighed.

“I couldn’t sleep,” he told them. “I can also do my paperwork from here, so if one or both of you wants to get some sleep early, you can consider yourselves relieved.”

“Are you all right?” Solace asked. She looked more relaxed than he’d seen her yet, and her dark eyes seemed warmer than usual as she regarded him.

“I’m fine,” he said, somewhat more shortly than he meant to. “Won’t impact the ship, just couldn’t sleep.”

Solace stiffened at his dismissal. Still more human than ebony statue, but still…

“Get some sleep, Commander,” he said quietly. “I just… I have history with Amaranthe. It’s personal.”

“Understood, sir,” she answered, some of the stiffness leaking out of her. “With your permission, Captain, I think I will take you up on your offer. I have a meeting with Commander Wong at eleven hundred, and I’d like more than four hours of sleep before discussing fuel requirements for antimatter reactors.”

“Dear gods, I let you schedule yourself for that?” Kyle asked, his concern only partially feigned. “Go, go! Sleep!”

That seemed to buy him a little bit less statue, and Solace was smiling as she nodded to both of them and slipped off the bridge.

Kyle interfaced with the computer as he carefully walked over to the command chair, checking the status of all the systems. If more was going on, he might have asked Solace for a report, but deep in warped space, very little could happen.

And the bad things, well, there tended to be very little anyone could do. Everyone on the old
Avalon’s
bridge had died when their Stetson stabilizers had failed and flooded the outside of the ship with deadly radiation.

He glanced over at Pendez, who’d returned her gaze to her console.

“Sorry for interrupting, Commander,” he said quietly. “That offer does apply to you too, you know. I think I can handle an FTL dark watch on my own.”

His Navigator turned in her chair, leveling a set of soft brown eyes he’d seen leave a trail of broken hearts across an entire ship on him. Kyle was mostly immune to Pendez’s charms, if not unaware of them.

“It was just girl talk. She,” Pendez nodded to the door where Solace had disappeared, “has no idea what to make of you, you know?”

“Talking about the Captain behind his back? I’m that funny?” Kyle asked dryly.

“No,” she chuckled. “You interrupted us looking at the latest fashion show in Castle City. Some of the outfits they brought out this year…” she shrugged. “Let’s just say with my boobs and Mira’s height,
neither
of us could pull them off.”

“Fashion show?” Kyle asked, looking askance at Pendez. He could see her following fashion in the Federation’s capital, but the thought didn’t fit with his experience of Mira Solace.

“We spend ninety-plus percent of our time in uniform,” Pendez pointed out. “A girl’s got to feel pretty
sometimes
– and with her height and skin, the Commander can pull off some outfits that would make me look short and fat.”

Kyle arched an eyebrow at his Navigator, who was in near-perfect physical condition under her curves, and she shook her head at him. They both knew he had no interest, and they both knew there was no appropriate response for him to make.

The conversation itself was a gray area, but it
was
an FTL dark watch after all.

“I’ll admit, Commander Solace and I have not had much… personal interaction,” Kyle said softly. “I am pleased with our professional relationship, though, and we hardly need to be friends.”

“She’ll get that eventually,” Pendez told him. “But… well, you know her first Captain tried to screw her – in multiple senses, right?”

“That took surprisingly little reading between the lines, yes,” Kyle admitted. “I can also guess that she didn’t report it, since Captain Haliburt still has a ship.”

“Hard to rock the boat when dealing with the Master after God of where you live, boss,” his Navigator told him. “She hasn’t told
me
much, but I can tell the bastard made several years of her life a living Void. Her captain
after
that was, well…”

“Jowan Botteril is a skilled, capable officer,”
Avalon’s
Captain observed dryly. “He also
delights
in some of the most ancient stereotypes of his orientation in a way that skims the bounds of propriety aboard a warship. He would have been completely unthreatening to her in that sense.”

“And then she has you,” she said softly. “You’re not exactly Navy Standard Issue as Captains go and, like I said, she doesn’t quite know what to make of you.”

“I can’t go easy on her, Maria,” Kyle replied, his voice very soft and serious. “She’s my Executive Officer – and Gods know, she’s
damn
good at the job.”

“Don’t think you need to go easy on her,” his Navigator replied. “I think you just need to remember where she’s coming from. You may not need to be friends, but from where I’m sitting, you
should
be. Even…”

She trailed off and then dodged away from Kyle’s glance.

“Even what, Commander?” he asked.

“Partners, sir,” she said finally, though Kyle wasn’t sure that was what she’d originally meant to say. “You need to be partners, sir – because if you are, the Commonwealth is never going to know what hit them.”

Even from a full light minute away, the planet Amaranthe looked sick. Diseased. The glass plains that had once been cities glittered in the starlight as Battle Group Seventeen approached from the outer system.

It had been beautiful once, a blue-green jewel of a world that had drawn immigrants from across the galaxy. At the beginning of the last war, the Republic of Amaranthe had been wealthy and powerful with the third-ranked Navy of the Alliance bringing over a dozen starships to the war against the Commonwealth

And then it had been the site of the single largest battle of the war. Fifty-seven capital ships had clashed in orbit while four billion souls watched. The Commonwealth had
shattered
the Alliance Second Fleet and seized control of Amaranthe orbit.

No-one – including the Commonwealth – seemed to be entirely sure what had happened after that. During the invasion, a series of deadly nano-weapons had been unleashed that had
eaten
the planet’s largest cities – and over two
billion
people.

After the Alliance kicked them out of the system in the
Second
Battle of Amaranthe, a massive relief effort had been launched. One of the sources of the supplies and money that had fuelled it, even before the war ended, had been the Commonwealth.

The Terrans had sworn blind after the war ended that their invasion force hadn’t been equipped with weapons of that type – that the Commonwealth arsenal didn’t even include mass-scale nano-weaponry.

As Kyle understood it, though, they’d basically said ‘we invaded the system, so everything that followed is our fault’ and formally taken responsibility for the atrocity.
Billions
of Commonwealth Dollars, Federation Stellars, and Imperial Marks had been poured into Amaranthe after the war.

Twenty years later, they had still barely begun rebuilding. The vast fields of nano-forged glass that had once been cities had resisted any attempt to break them up. The orbital infrastructure, destroyed by its own crews and workers to prevent it falling into Commonwealth hands, had only been partially replaced.

Amaranthe had no fleet now, but it didn’t lack defenders. Twelve massive capital ships, six from the Coraline Imperium and six from the Castle Federation, orbited the world. Despite Commonwealth declarations that Amaranthe’s neutrality in the war would be observed, the Alliance would take no chances.

“Sir, the Black Watch has requested our IFFs and approach codes,” Kyle’s communications officer reported.

“Send them over,” Kyle confirmed. “They’re expecting us.”

Thanks to the Q-Com, even with a light minute between
Avalon
and the warships of the Black Watch it only took a few seconds for the exchange to complete.

“Admiral Kato sends his greetings to the Battle Group,” he was informed. “I’m setting up a direct channel between Vice Admiral Tobin and Admiral Kato at their request.”

“Understood.” Kyle continued to watch the ugly splotches on the beautiful planet below.

“Sir, they’re asking if we would like to setup a visit to the Memorial?” his com officer continued. “They can close it to the public for a while if we want.”

A shiver ran through Kyle, and he bowed his head for a long moment.

“Tell them we’d like that, and inform the other ships’ crews once you’ve received confirmation of the timing,” he ordered, slowly raising his head. He thought a command, opening a channel to the Bosun.

“Master Chief, we’re going to have an opportunity for those of the crew that want to visit the Memorial,” he told Belmonte. “Can you check in with the section chiefs and make sure that anyone who wants to be on the list is on it?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied crisply. “I’ll make sure we have enough shuttle flights scheduled.”

“Thank you, Master Chief.” Kyle paused, then sighed softly. “Make sure I’m on the first shuttle, Bosun. I… need to see this.”

Dimitri Tobin had been to the Memorial before, but it still blew his mind. Once, a long time ago, it had been the Republic of Amaranthe battleship
Invictus
and the harbor of Verdant City, the Republic capital.

Invictus
had crashed into one of Amaranthe’s oceans in the battle over the planet, however, and Verdant City had been the site of one of the nano-weapon strikes. So the city had turned into a hundred-kilometer wide plain of gray glass, broken only by the harbor.

After the War, Amaranthe’s leadership had towed the kilometer-long navigation hazard that was the hulk of
Invictus
into the harbor, anchored it down against the edge of the glass, and removed the handful of zero point cells and positron capacitors the Commonwealth hadn’t ripped out to study. Decontaminated and safed, the hulk had then been used as the backdrop for plaque upon plaque of names. Every individual confirmed dead in the battle. Every individual confirmed or believed dead in the nano-weapon attack.

The names were in a very small font. For all that a kilometer-long hulk provided a lot of space, there were over two billion names listed.

With the Memorial being a kilometer long, it also left a lot of space. They’d shuttled down over four hundred crew members from the Battle Group’s ships in the first wave, but the Admiral had found himself alone as he’d walked further along the glass plain, looking for a specific name.

There
. It was where he remembered it from the last time he visited, and Dimitri laid his fingers on the etched letters of Flight Lieutenant Karl Michaels-Tobin. The old wound was mostly healed over now – twenty-plus years, a second marriage and multiple children could do that – but he still remembered.

Dimitri kissed his fingers, then pressed the kiss to the name.

“Never forgotten, my love,” he said quietly. “Never forgotten.”

Looking up from the name of his long-dead husband, Dimitri realized he wasn’t the only member of the crew who’d walked well away from the rest of the party. Kyle was standing near the end of the Memorial, looking away from the wrecked battleship across the featureless glass plain that had been Verdant City.

Curious, Dimitri approached his Flag Captain. The other man seemed to be looking for something… but there wasn’t much out there. The nano-weapon had eaten Verdant City’s famous stone-work along with its people and its skyscrapers. Everywhere the City had stood was just glass, as was a good chunk of what had been the surrounding area.

He found the sight even more depressing than the Memorial itself, so the Admiral tended to avoid looking at it when he visited the Memorial.

“Captain?” he said questioningly, stepping up behind Roberts. “You look like you’re looking for something.”

“I am,” Roberts replied, his voice unusually sad for a man. “Matching up landmarks with some old photos.” After a moment, he pointed. “There, I think.”

Following the line of the Captain’s fingers, Dimitri picked out one of the few features visible around the glass plain – the point where a line of hills ended, cut off by a sheer cliff where the nanites had eaten the soil and stone.

“The hill?” he asked.

“It fits the description,” Roberts said softly. “I think that’s where my father died.”

Dimitri nodded slowly.

“My husband died in orbit,” he confessed quietly. “A suicide strike by the last of our starfighters to try to stop the Commonwealth landing. They failed, obviously.”

“You were here?” Roberts asked, turning back to face the Admiral.

“I was. Junior Tactical Officer aboard the battlecruiser
Samson
,” Dimitri confirmed. “Karl was one of our pilots – we got married just six months beforehand. We were young, and in love, and determined not to let the war steal it from us.”

The Admiral felt very old and shook his head slowly.

“I didn’t know your father had died here,” he admitted. “I… didn’t realize he was killed in action.”

“It took a few years for his body to catch up,” Roberts said bitterly. “But he died here – died when he watched the nanites eat the people he’d been evacuating along with his entire company of Federation Marines.

“His body caught up the day the war ended, and he swallowed his own gun.”

Tobin looked back to the cliff, and a vivid image of standing just past that line and watching the men and women you commanded and the innocents you were trying to protect dissolve into glass.

“My god,” he whispered.

“They quote the number a lot,” Roberts said softly, “that we only had seven post-traumatic suicides out of
seventy million
men and women sent to war. Only seven. It doesn’t sound so wonderful when it was your family.”

“I’m sorry, Kyle,” Dimitri told him. He laid his hand on the other man’s shoulder and squeezed gently – a moment of compassion neither would have allowed anywhere else. “I didn’t know.”

“You’re not supposed to,” the Captain told him with a snort. “You know, I’ve never been here. Twenty and more years since he died, and I’ve never been here to see where.

“But with the war back on…”

“I’ve visited here before, to remember Karl,” Dimitri said quietly. “But I agree. It seemed… necessary to come by again.”

Across the glass plains where a city had died, the two men watched the sun set, each alone with their grief – but stronger for facing it together.