Vertigo: Aurora Rising Book Two (52 page)

For the first time in a long while, she found herself overcome by uncertainty. Of herself, of whether she was up to the challenge.

Naoborot dushen’ka, I think you will be spectacular at it.

“Understood, sir. Thank you for your trust. I assure you I will endeavor to be worthy of it. I realize your time is short, as is mine, but allow me to give you the first piece of unvarnished advice right now. Make peace with the Federation. Not a cease fire or a truce or an armistice, but true peace—and do it quickly.”

Amusement tinged the curve of his mouth. “My Chief of Staff was contacted several hours ago by a representative for Chairman Vranas, proposing a summit of both governments’ leadership.”

“Accept the proposal, sir. They were as much victims of the conspiracy as we were, and I have every reason to believe they are amenable to ending the war. If we expect to be able to fight these aliens, we need their help and they need ours.”

He considered the matter for several seconds, then nodded. “If humanity is annihilated because we were too busy squabbling with one another to manage a proper stand, we probably deserve the annihilation. I’ll begin making the arrangements tonight.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir.”

“I meant what I said out there at the podium. Don’t leave our soldiers exposed to a surprise raid by Senecan forces until we untangle this war, but otherwise every person, ship, weapon and tool should be focused on these aliens. We must slow them down until we can find a way to stop them.”

Finally a politician deserving of her respect. “I’ll begin implementing new directives as soon as I walk out the door. And may I say, best of luck, sir. We are all going to need a great deal of it.”

SENECA

C
AVARE,
M
ILITARY
H
EADQUARTERS

Commander Morgan Lekkas leaned against the wall in the entry area. A foot tapped the floor in a brisk dance of redirected energy. The secretary had told her she could sit while she waited, but she’d done far too much sitting today on the transport flight from Krysk to Seneca, the shuttle to Cavare and the levtram to Military HQ.

The screen on the opposite wall displayed a live news feed from of all things the Earth Alliance Assembly. She had caught scraps of news the last few days here and there, but hadn’t paid much attention until it concerned her, which now it perhaps did.

It seemed the Alliance Prime Minister had committed suicide? Hadn’t the previous PM been killed in an explosion the week before? There were questions surrounding the events leading up to the war, which was why it interested her, but no one was making definitive public statements as of yet.

Someone turned up the volume on the feed and Morgan closed her eyes.

She didn’t know if or when the war with the Alliance was going to officially end, but most of the 3
^rd
Wing had been pulled off the Federation border and sent to Seneca to await further orders. No explanation was given but it clearly related to the aliens advancing on the eastern front.

She highly doubted they’d be able to fight the Alliance in the southwest and aliens in the east, though as near as she could tell they hadn’t been doing much fighting of the aliens so far. Mostly they had been fleeing. The Cavare spaceport had been jammed with refugees from the eastern colonies, and rumors were flying that every colony east of Seneca not already under siege was being evacuated.

She hoped the military would muster up a fight soon; she hoped that was why she was standing around waiting outside some sort of conference room or other. As for what or whom it held she hadn’t a clue, but it was where she had been directed to go. The quality of the decor and extensiveness of security indicated it might hold someone or thing of importance.

The volume on the feed increased again and her gaze flitted to the screen.

“The Vote of No Confidence in Steven Brennon having now failed to pass—”

“You can go in now, Commander.”

She nodded a curt thanks to the secretary on her way to the door and stepped inside—then froze in the doorway.

This wasn’t a conference room. This was a command center. This was
the
command center.

The air buzzed as soldiers huddled around groups of screens or bounced from one group to the other. Three conference tables scattered around the room were occupied by more soldiers. The far wall was dominated by a large map.

Every settled world was marked on it, most of them colored the usual red for Federation worlds, blue for Alliance ones and green for the Independents. But not the eastern colonies.

Regardless of affiliation, to the right of a diagonal line cutting 320° down the map, the worlds were either marked by a black ‘X’ or highlighted in orange. Two columns helpfully ran along the right side of the map:

LOST:

Andromeda

Ceirt

Dair

Edero

Gaiae

Gaelach

Hadron

Hawking

Karelia

Lycaon

Messium

Midgard

New Orient

New Riga

Nitoris

Quero

Requi

Sagitta

Vela

Zetian

AT IMMINENT RISK OF FALLING:

Brython

Dresden

Henan

New Maya

Nystad

Morgan hadn’t joined the military because she was a patriot or because she had a deep and abiding desire to protect the citizens of the Federation. She was pleased enough when she did so successfully, but even then it was for mostly selfish reasons. She had joined the military for the sheer thrill of it.

Piloting transports or scout ships would never have offered her the rush of diving at 0.3mms through space in an inverted spin. It would never have enabled her to command weapons in the form of fighter jets with a thought or outmaneuver foes through asteroid fields or skim the buffeting edge of an atmosphere. It would never have allowed her to become so integrated with her ship that the ship may as well not exist at all.

She knew what others called her when they thought she wasn’t listening—adrenaline junkie, speed addict, bat-shit cracked—but she had never cared. Even if they were right, it was what she wanted. It was what she was alive for.

Now, staring at the list of fallen colonies in utter shock, for the first time in her life she felt brazen, primal outrage against an enemy. She felt a profound, elemental yearning to protect all the people out there from these invaders, from these monsters stealing their worlds and their lives.

“We’re in a fair bit of trouble, I’d say.”

She jumped, then hurriedly turned to find the speaker.

Field Marshal Eleni Gianno—the Supreme Commander of the Senecan Federation Armed Forces—stood next to her, arms crossed over her chest.

Morgan snapped her feet together and hand up in a hasty salute. “Ma’am. Marshal Gianno. Commander Morgan Lekkas, 3
^rd
Wing, Southern Fleet.” Clueless as to what to do next, she glanced back at the map. “I had no idea it was this serious, ma’am.”

“Few do. It became this serious very rapidly. Far faster than we’ve been able to react.”

“Ma’am…Brython is less than a kiloparsec from Seneca.”

“Yes, it is. I suspect the aliens can be here in hours if they so choose. The one factor acting in our favor is as they advance, they reach more worlds—and larger ones—in need of destruction. Slaughtering entire planets takes time.”

The two of them stared silently at the map for a while longer. Finally Gianno looked to her. “Thank you for coming, Commander. We’re at last beginning to piece together data on the aliens’ capabilities and tactics. I’d like to review some of the analyses STAN has generated with you.”

She frowned hesitantly, not at all clear why the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces wanted to review anything with her…then arched an eyebrow in spite of herself. “STAN?”

“Strategic and Tactical Artificial Network, the military’s state of the art synthetic neural net.”

“But…STAN?”

Marshal Gianno shrugged. “The Alliance is calling theirs ‘ANNIE.’ The warenuts in Tech weren’t about to be outdone and spent two weeks coming up with an acronym that resulted in a silly name. So what do you think?”

“I’m glad to help, ma’am. But may I ask why me?”

“Word is you’re the best fighter pilot in the Federation, possibly in the galaxy. You’ve refused promotion three times in four years, ostensibly because you didn’t want to give up the cockpit. And in my mind with good reason, because your superior officers insist you control the battlefield like no one else. Your biosynthetics and personal ware are bleeding edge, and that’s just the upgrades we’re aware of.”

Morgan started to protest that she wasn’t hiding any gray-market ware—which of course she
was
—but Gianno held up a hand to silence her.

“It doesn’t matter. In fact, you’ll probably need a few more upgrades before long. Whether in days or weeks, these aliens are going to come for Seneca and we have to be ready for them. There are numerous pieces to the puzzle of doing so, but one of them is determining how to take out their multitude of small interceptor ships.”

They had reached a cloistered space containing three separate screens, two control panels and a circular table. Two of the screens looped footage of what appeared to be an engagement by a military force of the alien ships above a planet. The vid focused on the sea of strange insectile vessels swarming the region.

She dropped her hands on the table and leaned in to study the screens, forgetting she probably should still be standing at attention. “That’s a lot of ships. Far too many for frigates to destroy. They’d be decimated before taking out a tenth of them, assuming frigates could take out that many. The alien vessels are larger than fighters but faster and more maneuverable. Still, our fighters are the only craft which stand a chance of going toe-to-toe with them.”

She eyed the Marshal beside her. “Ma’am, where is this? Are we engaging the aliens somewhere? New Riga, or Lycaon?”

“New Riga and Lycaon are gone. This is from Messium, yesterday.”

“Messium? The Alliance sent us this data?”

Gianno gave her a mysterious smile. “As I said, events are moving very rapidly.”

“How did their fighters do against these ships?”

“Better than the frigates, but at too high a cost. Three times as many fighters were lost as alien ships destroyed.”

“In a war of attrition, we lose.”

“Quite. We have analyses of their structural weaknesses, minimal though they are, as well as their flight patterns and tendencies. Commander, I’d like you to study it and work with the Artificial to devise a strategy for besting them.”

“I’ll need full-sensory immersion for the data and a remote interface with the Art…uh, STAN.”

Gianno motioned toward a door on the left wall. “If you’ll follow me, everything is set up for you.”

56

SIYANE

U
NCHARTED
S
PACE

F
OR THE SECOND TIME IN
a month, the
Siyane
rose to carry them away from an inhospitable planet which shouldn’t exist. As before, the ship would carry them home as bearers of vital information which could well mean the difference between the survival or destruction of humanity. But not yet.

“Before we leave this space, I’d like to try to find the other portal. If this is a ‘lobby,’ there’s another gateway here somewhere.”

Beside her Caleb swung his chair around to face her, his expression unreadable. “Okay.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

“I don’t need to. You want to find it because it’s unknown and thus enticing. Also because you want to understand this place and these aliens.”

She shifted away from him, a little unnerved. He hadn’t been joking when he said he was a master at reading her. “Something like that. I realize we need to hurry—believe me I do—but I feel like it may be important.”

“I agree.”

Her gaze jumped back to him. “You do?”

“Absolutely. I suspect Mnemosyne—Mesme—was largely honest in what it said but there was a prodigious amount it didn’t say. We ought to gather as much information as we can before we return. I doubt we’ll get a second chance.”

She smiled, relieved. She hadn’t relished arguing with him and would probably have relented if he had disagreed with any fervor.