Chapter 7: The Negotiator

Laura. 8

She supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised; a person’s luck only stretched so far, and Commodore Hillman’s hostile appearance in orbit - considering the size of the ship that had just torn a gouge out of the planet’s surface, not to mention Guardian Wu’s requisition of an Imperium Destroyer - seemed to be almost an inevitability. She wondered, for a moment, what could have happened if her Ancient companions hadn’t shown up on the Atlas, leaving her and her Mariner brethren to scour the ship alone. She wasn’t naive enough to think that a caravan of Mariner scientists being shuttled to the surface would have gone unnoticed, nor the constant stream of supplies that would be needed to keep them functional for however many ... well... decades it would have taken to get a handle on the tech that this ship possessed. Then there was the matter of trying to get it all out. The chances of doing that undetected, let alone the long-term support effort by what was essentially an enemy of the Imperium in Imperium space, was so far-fetched as to be dismissed out of hand. Eventually, the Empire would have caught on to something happening, and this fleet would have shown up.

She had said before that, ship-for-ship, the Mariner fleet was among the most powerful of any known species in this part of space. The reason for that was two-fold. Most obvious was the technological boon reaped from the Primus. Even though Wu called the reverse engineering of vital ancient components “crude,” he also called them effective. There was no way to replicate the materials or the power source needed to make a faithful like-for-like recreation of Ancient tech. Still, suitable alternative materials and power requirements produced better shields, improved sensors, upgraded engines, and more powerful weapons. It made a Mariner ship a force to be reckoned with. The second element of Mariner superiority came from the Mariners themselves. Generations in space had taught them to think in three dimensions, taking roll, pitch, and stellar conditions into account for almost everything as a matter of course, they navigated and flew by instinct, not by training. Humans manned imperium ships, and as skilled as they may be, they were simply not equipped to think in those terms, at least not instinctually. The things that came naturally to a Mariner pilot were part of a chain of processes to an Imperium officer, something they had to tick off a checklist that most of them didn’t really understand. If two ships of equal size came face to face, the chances of an Imperium victory depended almost entirely on how much the Mariner crew fucked up.

It was, after all, a universal fact that wars were not necessarily won by the strongest side but by the side who fucked up the least and learned from their mistakes when they did.

However, the simple truth in this situation was that the Mariners would not have been facing Imperium ships head-on. The Imperium would have - and indeed had - sent an entire fleet. One mariner ship could take out an imperium ship with ease. Taking out seven Imperium ships was an entirely different proposition. Her eyes flicked to the sensor screen on the right side of the bridge. She still couldn’t read the language scrolling across the display, but the extraordinarily detailed schematics of the ships in orbit made it very easy for her to identify their classifications. The Karachi was a light cruiser, a formidable ship on its own, and attached to it were four destroyers and two frigates. It would take a fleet of at least five Mariner destroyers to combat this fleet, and seeing five Mariner destroyers, the Imperium would have just called for reinforcements. As unskilled as the humans were in terms of stellar navigation and combat, they made up for that with staggeringly high numbers of ships. The entire Mariner fleet would eventually have been dragged into the conflict to hold this position for any prolonged period of time, more and more of it being required to counter the increasing number of ships being thrown at them by the Imperium, and even then, it would eventually be destroyed by the endless waves of Imperium reinforcements. Imperium naval doctrine essentially boiled down to wars of attrition, which their almost bottomless pool of ships and personnel could always win. Saying that the Home Fleet could destroy Imperium forces at a rate of ten to one was not idle boasting; it was true, but in a large-scale battle like this one could turn out to be, they wouldn’t be fighting at a ratio of ten to one; the imperium would outnumber them at something closer to thirty to one. Those were odds that not even Mariner superiority could overcome.

The Mariner high command would have known that, and the effort would have been abandoned long before it got that far, meaning the Atlas would have been abandoned, too. Understandably curious as to why a Mariner expedition was on the planet to begin with, the Imperium would have launched its own investigation, possibly found the Atlas for themselves, and even if they hadn’t been able to recover it, their scientists would have started the same reverse engineering efforts the Mariners had carried out on the Primus, and the Mariners technological edge would have been wiped out practically overnight. More than that, the Atlas has something the Primus never did ... Power! With those systems fully functional, it wasn’t a massive leap of imagination to think that the Imperium’s reverse-engineered components would be superior to the Mariner’s simply because the technology they had studied had been in full working order.

Realistically, unless enormous and prohibitively counter-productive measures were taken to ensure secrecy, there was no feasible way for the Mariners to have benefitted from the discovery in any meaningful way, not in her lifetime, at least.

It was starting to become more and more obvious why Lycander, the Commander of the Home Fleet and de facto leader of the Mariners, had been so eager to deal with her Ancient companions. If they could get the Atlas out of the ground - which they very clearly could - and were willing to trade for technical information, the whole problem could be neatly sidestepped, allowing both parties to benefit enormously.

But then, of course, Guinevere Hillman and her fucking fleet showed up.

Seven Imperium ships may not have sounded like something to be afraid of, at least not compared to the tales of battle groups consisting of hundreds of ships, but Laura knew how potent a force this could be. The two frigates were fast and would attempt to cut off flight vectors. One of those destroyers doubtlessly held a large-area interdiction device, and the rest would close in quickly to pummel an enemy ship with broadsides while the cruiser engaged with heavy weaponry from range. They were long-practiced, well-established, and highly predictable tactics, but there was no denying their effectiveness. The only way to really combat such a fleet maneuver was with brute strength and very few - if any - Mariner vessels were capable of standing against it single-handedly, at least not without taking severe amounts of damage.

But the Mariners weren’t in the Atlas.

The casual way that Elijah had dismissed Commodore Hillman was as astonishing in its bravery as it was in its facetiousness. It was a level of insolence Laura doubted the commodore had ever experienced in her life. The only way he could have made it more disrespectful, dismissive, and flippant was if he had yawned at her.

It would have been funny, though.

Laura had known these two men for barely twelve hours, nowhere near long enough to establish anything like a trusting relationship with them. Yet, she found herself taking comfort in their confidence. They knew what this ship was capable of, at least in theory if not in practice, and seemed absolutely convinced that the threat from the Imperium fleet posed no danger. Considering where she was, there was only really one of two possibilities available to her: either they were right, or they were crazy. If they were right, she didn’t have anything to worry about, and if they were crazy, she wouldn’t be alive long enough for it to matter, so there was no point fretting over it.

With a shrug, she leaned back into the ridiculously comfortable chair and looked out of the main view screen. Having spent all her life in space, she’d had more experience with bridge chairs than any person should have, and this particular bridge chair had no business being this fucking comfortable. She wondered, for a moment, if she could convince the two men to let her take it to her ship to act as her new bed.

She chuckled to herself at the absurdity of her thoughts. She was currently in an Ancient Battleship, ascending through the sickly brown atmosphere of an Imperium planet, and about to potentially go into combat against a fair proportion of the 23rd Defence fleet. Not all of it, of course, but enough of it to normally make her very, very nervous. Not only was she not nervous, she was thinking about chairs. Under normal circumstances, she would be questioning her own craziness at that moment, but her normal circumstances must have been left in her other pants, or at least in that fucking atmospheric suit that was still laying in a crumpled heap by the outer hatch.

Before her eyes, banks of clouds zipped past the Atlas as it gained more and more altitude; the sky was starting to leak its brownness as the heavier compound - like air - grew thinner the higher they got. After only a minute or so of climbing - a feat that should have been simply impossible for a normal ship with engines this big, considering the speed that the compound cloud typically clogged them up - the sky resumed its natural azure hue, and the brilliance of the sun lit up the heavens in a way that only a Mariner could genuinely appreciate.

The brilliance of daytime, while annoying to things like body clocks, was a natural wonder that simply couldn’t be replicated in space. It was light and heat, distorted and spectrally broadened by the Ozone layer, colored by nitrogen particles in the air it passed through, reflected inwards by the atmospheric bubble around the planet to make it seem more vibrant, and it bathed the planet in the most magnificent shades of blues. In space, it was a ball of fire in the center of a star system; it rarely provided enough light or warmth for anything and functioned as little more than an identificational or navigational marker for the system it sat in and the source of stellar winds and gravity fields. Laura hated being planetside for a whole host of reasons; not being able to see the stars was very high on that list. But occasionally ... just occasionally ... she withdrew her cynicism and sense of discomfort just long enough to be able to appreciate the astonishing beauty possible in an infinite universe. It was, after all, the dream of countless generations before her to watch that glorious blue sky slowly fade away to blackness as they finally left the planet’s atmosphere, just as she was seeing now.

And then the moment was ruined by the bright red beam of an Imperium focused-laser cannon shot racing just above their bow.

Laura blinked away the sear of color on her retina, flashing a worried glance over to Wu and Elijah. “I believe that was a warning shot,” Wu said glibly.

“Think we should respond?” Elijah chuckled back.

“I think it would be rude not to,” the older man shrugged. “But you’re in command.”

The entire bridge suddenly flashed white, a glow that seemed to blind her for a few seconds before fading away, but this one didn’t come from outside the ship as the first laser had; this one seemed to come from everywhere around her. She blinked again, this time in confusion, and looked around for a second before her eyes fell on the viewscreen.

It was different. The view of the outside had been broad and obstructed only by the very small amount of hull between the bridge windows and the vast expanse of space, maybe only a hundred feet or so. Now, however, there seemed to be miles of glossy gray hull between their vantage point and the front of the ship. “Err, what was that?” she asked cautiously.

“He transported us to the tactical bridge,” Wu answered for a busy-looking Elijah.

“We have a combat bridge?” Laura balked. “Where?”

“Pretty close to the center of the ship,” Wu shrugged. “The command deck is pretty exposed in a fight, and the views from there are not really helpful in combat, so he used the bridge’s built-in matter transfer system to move us here. It’s safer.”

“So that is...” she nodded at the viewscreen.

“The view from external sensors and camera, yes. There is at least about four kilometers worth of superstructure between us and the hull in any direction.”

Laura nodded, about to say something else, when movement on the screen made her freeze. Parts of the hull were peeling back, like sequins on a dress folding over themselves to expose a tiny section of the hull, or at least tiny in comparison to the rest of it. Laura had seen the research done on the Primus’s weapon systems; she knew that they worked on a retractable turret design, but the Mariners had never been able to understand how the hull opened. Now, she was watching firsthand as numerous small sections retracted and about a dozen turrets rapidly grew out of the depressions. The chime of the comm frequency echoed around the bridge again, and Elijah opened the channel without waiting for either her or Wu to give input.

“Consider that your first and only warning,” the furious-looking face of Commodore Hillman appeared on screen. “Power down your shields and your engines immediately.”

“Hello again, Gwinny,” Elijah gave her an impish smile. “I feel you are not grasping the situation you are in. If you could be so kind as to fuck off, I won’t have to break your pretty little flotilla.”

“I am a Commodore of the Imperium!” Hillman raged. “You will bow to the authority that the Emperor has placed in me and surrender your vessel immediately or...”

One of the turrets on the Atlas’s port side topdeck fired. A blue ribbon of light flashed across the considerable distance between it and the nearest of the fleet’s frigates, seeming to connect them together for a second before guttering out. Laura could only blink, aware of the burst of light over her vision and the stare at what was left of the Imperium ship. The Atlas’s energy weapon - she had no idea what else to call it, having no idea how it worked - had cored through the front of the Frigate, turning the smallest of the Imperium ships into something that looked like a toilet roll tube. The ship just hung there for a moment before the catastrophic damage done to its systems allowed the power core to go critical, and the remains of the hulk disappeared inside a blinding white light as it exploded. There was nothing left of it when the light faded away.

Laura - no stranger to small-scale weapon exchanges between starships - was pretty sure her jaw was becoming intimately familiar with her lap.

“Please consider that my first and last warning, Commodore,” Elijah finally spoke after a few moments of stunned silence on both bridges. There was no mistaking the hostility and menace in his voice this time. “Now, get out of my way before I warn the rest of your fleet.”

Hillman, for her part, was just blinking at something to her right, her face drained of color. “Commodore, your orders!” a man’s voice sounded from somewhere on the Imperium bridge.

“That shot cut right through her shields!” another voice said, “We need to withdraw and call for reinforcements!”

“For God’s sake, Commodore, snap out of it!” the first voice shouted again. “What are your orders?!?”

Hillman blinked and looked back up at the screen. “This is not the last time you will be seeing me, traitor!” she growled at Elijah.

Elijah just smiled. “I hope, for your sake, that you’re wrong.”

The Commodore shivered with fury. “Alert the rest of the fleet,” she growled. “All ships withdraw.” The channel closed without another word, and they all watched in silence as the Imperium fleet came about and powered away in the opposite direction. The single remaining frigate took point as if desperate to escape the same fate as had befallen her sister ship. Elijah spun in his chair to face them.

“I thought that went well.” he shrugged. “A bit of gunboat diplomacy.”

“What the fuck was that thing?” Laura exclaimed, a hand vaguely gesturing to the retracting turrets on the screen.

“Inverted, phased particle cannon,” Elijah smiled, tapping his finger on his helmet. “It’s funny; I had no idea they existed until I put this thing on. But that is the lowest powered weapon of our loadout.”

“The lowest?!?” Laura balked. “There are more powerful ones?”

“Yup,” Elijah grinned. “The technical name for them doesn’t really translate from our language to yours, though, but there are Sentinel Cannons and Arbitor Cannons, too. Those are our big guns. I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure a shot from an Arbitor cannon would punch a hole through a space station.”

Laura’s mind felt like it was running out of her ears. “You ... you just declared war on the Imperium. They’re going to hunt you to the ends of the Galaxy,” she murmured woefully.

“It was inevitable,” Elijah nodded. “The Emperor will do anything to get his hands on technology like this. What do you think will happen if he succeeds?” Laura was in no state of mind to answer theoretical questions like that, and she looked up at Elijah almost hopelessly. “Endless war,” he answered when she didn’t. “Every neighboring species would be forced to bend the knee or be destroyed. As soon as the Atlas took off, this was always going to end in violence.”

“So, what? What’s your plan? Go to war with the entire Imperium?”

Elijah and Wu looked at each other for a moment before the younger man turned back to her. “Yeah, pretty much.”

Laura opened her mouth, but the question died on her lips. For the first time in her adult life, she felt pathetically, dangerously out of her depth. The need for negotiations to go well with Lycnader and the Home Fleet was now more urgent than ever. The Mariners had, historically, kept out of all Imperium wars and just moved further out into unclaimed space every time a conflict threatened to catch up with them. But now they were anchored in place by the need to protect the Primus. If this part of the Galaxy was caught up in the inferno of large-scale galactic war, the Mariners could be forced to choose between standing and fighting to keep the Primus or retreating to safety without it.

“You could take what you want from the Mariners by force, couldn’t you?” she whimpered, starting to see the danger.

“Of course,” Elijah frowned.

“Then what’s stopping you? How do I know I’m not just leading you to my home so you can destroy it?”

“Honor,” Elijah shrugged. “There are things you don’t understand, things that I didn’t understand before I put this helmet on and downloaded the ship’s archives.” Laura blinked at that but decided it was a question for another day. “The Mariners have nothing to fear from us; if anything, we are on the same side. We just have the power to...” he paused for a second. “Let’s just say, ‘correct some historic wrongs.’” he gave her a pointed look before turning his attention back to the screen as the Atlas’s engines powered up and it started to make its way toward the edge of the system.

“I ... I don’t understand.” Laura finally said, her voice pleading for reassurance.

“I know,” he smiled warmly at her. “Trust me, I know how much of a mind fuck this all is. I was a college student on Earth a week ago, and now I’m a Marshall. Everything will be fine, and no harm will come to you or your people. You have my word.”

For reasons that Laura couldn’t even begin to comprehend, his eyes and the sincerity of his voice made her feel better. She was trusting him with not only her own life, but the lives of every person in the fleet. They were her family, bonded by something more than just random genetics; they had a shared culture and a mutual purpose. She could put her life in the hands of any Mariner alive and know - categorically know - that they wouldn’t betray her. It was an insular and vaguely xenophobic race, but it was hers, and every shred of meaning in her life came from them. And yet, Elijah’s calm, soothing words were enough to banish the thought that she was bringing trouble to their airlock. She sighed and nodded, relaxing into her chair again and looking back at the screen. “Where’s Hillman?”

“Shadowing us,” Elijah shrugged. “They are just inside their sensor range, following us while sending frantic calls for reinforcements to Imperium Naval Command. They’re planning to ambush us before we clear the gravity well.” a small smile spread on his face. “Unfortunately for them, we’ll be long gone by then.” With a wink, the ship started to rumble, and her eyes automatically flicked to one of the displays on the opposite wall. The engines had been holding at about thirty percent power, a speed that the Imperium fleet was just about able to keep up with. With only a thought, Elijah ramped them up to closer to eighty percent. The Atlas seemed to surge forward, its velocity quickly matching, then overtaking, the top speed of a Marine strike fighter in only a few seconds. Traveling in-system at these sorts of speeds in anything bigger than a shuttle was - by everything her lifetime of training had taught her - tantamount to an attempt at suicide. Ships of any considerable size were simply incapable of maneuvering fast enough to avoid things that would reduce them to shrapnel. Yet, the soft, lazy banks and rolls of the ship - visible only by the orientation of planets and moons zipping past them - indicated that the Atlas was more than capable of doing something modern science considered impossible.

She could only smile at the thought of Hillman’s face as all her devious plans fell apart, and her prize rocketed well beyond her sensor range and out of her grasp.

“ETA for the edge of the system: eighty-six minutes,” Elijah announced without taking his eyes off the screen. Laura choked on her own tongue, under an hour and a half to make the trip that had taken her more than three days in the Seren. “Next stop: The Yridian Nebula. We should be there by the day after tomorrow.” Laura groaned, too; that part of the journey through hyperspace had taken more than a week. Every single thing about this ship was just tormenting her with the prospects of technology to be unlocked.

She flicked her eyes down to her wrist-mounted computer; it was still maintaining its connection to the computer on the Seren, and the clock was still functioning perfectly. According to the time, and her body that was tied indelibly to it, it was approaching nine o’clock at night. So much had happened today. She had started the morning alone, trapped and getting increasingly worried about a long, drawn-out demise to starvation or dehydration. She had been ... well, captured would be the accurate term to describe her interaction with Wu and Elijah, but it certainly didn’t feel like that. She had met them, and a whole world of possibilities had opened up to her in a matter of hours. She had facilitated negotiations between the Ancients and the Mariners; she had watched the impossible as the massive ship had pulled itself out of the surface of Xnios. Then, she had witnessed the most terrifying display of raw firepower she had ever conceived of.

She was drained, her body and mind sapped of all but the most essential of energy. Everything about her felt heavy and sluggish; even keeping her head upright on her shoulders seemed to be demanding a totally unreasonable amount of effort, and now that the excitement of the day had died down, the soul-consuming weariness of it had well and truly caught up with her.

“So, err, do I go back to my ship to sleep?” she asked sheepishly, this time directing her question to Wu.

The older man blinked and looked at his own clock. “Oh wow, time really does fly when you’re having fun. Yes, I think that would be appropriate for tonight; we can assign you quarters tomorrow to make things easier. Come on, I’ll help you get back to the hangar bay.” He smiled, stood from his chair, and waited for Laura to do the same before they both left the tactical bridge and headed for the nearest elevator ... transporter ... thing, giving Elijah a wave and a smile as she left.

Stevo. 20

Well, there was certainly something to be said for timing. They had been set a deadline of twenty-four hours to clear everything out of the base; they had managed it in twenty with the flotilla of rebel ships breaking orbit a full eight hours ahead of schedule. A few systems had been left online in the base, if only to give the impression that it was still manned and functional, but one of those systems had been the uplink to the grid of long-range sensor satellites dotted throughout the system. Twelve hours after they had left orbit, those sensors had picked up the massive Colossus Carrier group racing toward the planet. Traveling out of the system in the opposite direction, it was impossible for the Imperium fleet to pick up the retreating rebel one, but thanks to the uplink being broadcast to the command ship, the senior staff - Stevo included - were able to watch as the fleet approached.

Thirty-six hours after the last rebel stepped onto the evacuation ships, the first shot of the orbital bombardment smashed into the base. The security feed - the cameras monitoring the base and its surroundings - was another of the systems left active. Stevo wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not because it forced the entire staff to watch the frankly horrifying fate that befell the base and would have befallen them, too, if they had still been there.

There were, of course, three types of orbital bombardment. The first and the weakest - comparatively speaking - was the type of close artillery support that had been called down on the beach during the Marines’ assault on it. High-powered, explosive ordinance of varying sizes and types, intended to royally fuck up the days of anyone within the blast zone. The second was the nuclear option, literally in many cases. It was the deployment of large-scale destructive ordinance - often thermonuclear in design - intended to render entire areas of the planet and the forces within them into radioactive balls of fire. Only the most heavily shielded of bunkers could survive one of those and it was very rare indeed that only one was used.

The final and most extreme option was what they were witnessing now. Most people, himself included, could never really grasp the true power of shipborne energy weaponry. To a Marine, either something could kill you, or it couldn’t. How easily it could kill you wasn’t really a factor. But to watch a few dozen of these beams smash into the surface at random places around the Island on which the rebel base was located was a lesson in the true meaning of firepower.

When all the fancy physics of the varying types of energy weapons were finished, they boiled down to one thing: heat. The heat delivered by a sustained burst from one of the battleships in orbit was enough to melt a fifty-meter-wide hole in the ground. The longer the burst went on, the deeper that hole was dug. At about a depth of twenty miles, a process that took a terrifyingly small number of minutes, the laser broke through the crust of the planet and into the mantle, releasing a huge amount of pressure and turning that fifty-meter-hole into an explosively powerful volcano. Except there wasn’t only one of them. No less than forty of those lasers hit the surface, and every one of them had the same effect. With the tectonic plate on which the island sat fundamentally undermined, it started to break apart.

Stevo had seen a few holo-movies depicting that cliche end-of-the-world stuff; they usually involved the hero of the movie outrunning various amounts of lava and miraculously surviving, but this was nothing like that. The sea boiled, the land melted, the air caught fire, everything for thousands of miles in every direction was utterly destroyed, incinerated in minutes, and the fumes and toxic gasses released from those holes in the surface would blot out the sun and make the rest of the planet uninhabitable in a matter of weeks.

He had gone down to that planet in the dropships believing that the rebels had mixed themselves in with an established planetary population ... he had believed that the planet was inhabited. He thanked whatever merciful gods he could think of that he had been wrong. The planet was deserted. The second prayer of thanks came after only a minute or two of watching the aftermath when the cameras and the uplink feeding the fleet their signal melted.

He slumped back into his chair and glanced around the room. General Crow looked as white as a sheet and he briefly considered if someone should be getting the man a bucket to throw up into. Colonel Michaels and Admiral Valdek - no doubt having witnessed this before, or at least being aware of what that kind of firepower could do - looked calmer, but not by much. There were a few other officers in the room, most of whom he didn’t recognize, but his eyes finally fell on the distraught-looking - yet still somehow staggeringly beautiful - face of Silvia West. She was sitting right next to him, so it wasn’t a stretch for him to find her in the crowd, but it did make it rather obvious that he was staring.