Author's Preface
The assumption that you know the effects of human aggression because they fought a border conflict against you is laughable.
They fight the hardest amongst themselves. And even now, inside the framework of the Aligned Worlds, there are three human civil wars between different colonies.
The Aligned planets don't intervene, because, honestly, I think the Humans like it that way.
So, please, in your own interest, don't make me go home and tell the Humans you chose not to heed my warnings again.
— Ambassador Nukkik to the Hrun delegation, 29 P.I.
Even though the Gneisenau was essentially an ASN ship, Sanders could see the German-French influences in the ship's design.
The side panels attached to the floor in a different way. The hatches were set at a different distance and, unlike on her ship, could only be passed by two people at once.
Whoever thought the Niobe was like a submarine would get seriously claustrophobic on this ship.
She followed Captain Abfalter, or as the mostly French and German crew called him, Kapitän Abfalter, to his office.
As she met him, she half expected him to have the usual German accent almost all lower ranks on the ship seemed to have.
"You see, Admiral, even though a BC40X class is almost a third larger than the BC30X, we have less space. Mostly due to the twin Davies Guns and the missile and torpedo launchers."
"Yeah, I feel like I'm in an old cruiser."
Abfalter turned around, his mustache framing the big smile on his face. "That was the basis of the ship's design. But you'll see, we did manage to use the space more efficiently."
"Kapitän." Sanders used the German word intentionally. "Not that I don't value the tour; the ship is a beauty, if somewhat crammed, but what about the Niobe ?"
Abfalter just extended his hand in an attempt to help Sanders through the hatch. She appreciated the gesture as she still felt a bit weak.
"My Marines are finished securing her, and the engineering teams are working on bringing her back online."
That information was new to Sanders. When she passed out inside the hangar, the ship had been fully operational, except the hangar, as far as she knew.
Abfalter seemingly picked up on her confusion.
"It seems some of your crew lashed out at their surroundings in their delirious state. And the engineering team stopped the fusion core before passing out. Also, the ship was infected with a pretty nasty virus. And lastly, you had a nice garden growing in the hangar."
"Burrow lichen, the scrubbers were out, I had to do something."
"Understandable, frankly. The fact you managed to save most of your crew is astonishing, Sir."
"Zeus?"
She missed him. He had become a… a friend?
"The VI core was severed with micro-explosives. It still has charge, specialists are working to attach it again. But it's badly damaged. We will know more for sure in a few hours."
Fear, sadness, emotions she wasn't used to in those kinds of situations flowed over her.
"Have you been close to him?"
This question caught her off guard. Did he know about the sentient AIs?
"As close as one could be to a VI."
Again the warm, mustache-covered smile. Why did German captains all have those Victorian mustaches?
"Sure, Admiral, anyway, August, our ship's AI, is helping our engineers, and we are preparing a VI core aboard to transfer your last crew member over."
Ship's AI, not VI? And the hint at my last crew member. He knew, and August was probably also awakened. But there was currently a don't ask, don't tell policy regarding sentient AIs.
"Thanks."
They had continued their walk along the hallway and were now in front of large automatic doors.
"The Arboretum, we thought you'd want to see your crew and talk to them."
The doors opened, and Sanders stood in the largest garden she had ever seen aboard a ship. On one side was a lake, surrounded by large oak trees.
A wild strawberry field lay close by, where crewmen picked fruit.
The garden seemed larger than physically possible inside the frame of the ship.
"It's mostly holographic, the cobblestones are the borders of the real room."
Following Abfalter's gestures, she saw gray cobblestones framing a small area of the garden. Far more believable than the insanely large park shown.
"One side is linked to Dunkerque 's garden, allowing for easy small talk and even virtual tennis matches. Half of your crew is over there."
Abfalter pointed to one of the invisible walls, where she could see the engineering team sitting in a field.
I want that on Niobe.
"The 40X are built with far longer deployments in mind. Gardens help."
They sure did.
"Aaaachtung!"
One of the Gneisenau 's crew members had spotted Sanders. The scream- how she hated the fucking scream.
Her crew made the same face she knew she must have.
Turning to Abfalter, she whispered, "Captain, I am a guest here; please, no more screaming."
"Sure thing, Sir."
Most of her ship's crew stood together at the holowall, so everyone could hear what she wanted to say.
As she approached them, the crew lined up under Commander Sharif's guidance. She waved him off and signaled the crew to sit down.
They were her family, and she knew everyone was in crisis at the moment. Rank and formalities had to wait for tomorrow.
"It's nice to see all of you here. I'll keep this short and informal."
She looked over the collective crew, 350 men and women, and the 150-man-strong Marine detachment. Minus the dead crew members.
I don't even know yet who didn't survive…
"What happened to us is none of your fault."
Who's missing? Yurdantho was there, in the back, studying her, it seemed.
"It was the fault of a saboteur, a traitor among us."
Mitchel and Yazzle were here, Grabowski, the young sensor tech, as well, good.
"So, don't waste time thinking about whether you could have stopped it; no one could have, except the traitor."
Lieutenant Regina Hill was also here, next to her, the blonde captain. Sanders now remembered her name: Shurian, Angel Shurian.
"One more thing. We all had severe CO2 poisoning; one of the effects is loss of emotional control."
Some of the crew's faces turned red, some looked down in shame.
"Some might have said and done things they wouldn't do otherwise."
Now some heads turned really red.
"Me included. So, if I have done or said things to one of you, I'm sorry. It wasn't me speaking. Say sorry to the people around you, and let's forget it. The logs of this incident will be sealed, and no entry of things that happened will enter personnel files."
She could feel the crew collectively breathing out.
"Relax, rest. As soon as Niobe is repaired, I intend to catch my fleets and drag that bastard in front of a court-martial, where I personally pull the trigger on high treason."
Judging by some looks from the crew, Sanders knew she had to lock the traitor up on another ship.
Given how she felt about whoever was responsible, it was best for the traitor to be far away from her. Or incidents might happen.
—————
Admiral Russo stood in the control center of Burrow Station. He noticed he had been walking up and down the gallery again, and that his nervous walk irritated the crew.
Commodore Garcia had done everything humanly possible already, so there was little left to do. And doing nothing wasn't in Russo's blood.
Garcia walked up to the gallery.
"Sir, is everything all right?"
"Nothing is right. We lost all outside communications, a Batract invasion fleet is coming, and something is brewing on Burrow."
Through the large panoramic window, he looked at the planet. The former brown-blackish husk had become suspiciously green again. Even the sea had begun to change back to a blue color.
Dr. Stein and his team had sent a report he didn't understand half of. But basically, Burrow was terraforming itself, and the effect was speeding up.
"We have done what we could. Luckily, Earth has sent the schematics for the Nixtred frames."
"How's production going?"
Garcia smiled his boyish smile. Russo liked the Commodore, even though the man broke the chain of command every waking moment.
"Thanks to the previous issues with evacuating the planet, the Burrow system has probably more industrial capacity than Sol. If the Batract don't surprise us, and we can keep the fabricators fed with raw materials, we'll have a frame for every enemy ship." His smile grew wider.
"Our ships might not even need to fire a single shot."
Russo was from the old guard. He knew as much. The younger generation, like Garcia, fought logistical wars. Outproduce the enemy. The slightly older generation, like Sanders, loved to jump the enemy in the face and rip their flesh out.
He preferred tactics and strategy.
That's why he had left the front-line fighting to the younger generations.
What do you do if you're attacked by an enemy superior in number but much inferior in weapons and strategy?
Garcia and Sanders' answer was to produce drones and missiles without end and choke the enemy forces.
That wasn't what he had trained for.
Thus the constant pacing on the gallery.
"Admiral, Commodore, we had something odd happen."
"Is that the way to report, Lieutenant?"
Garcia had managed to correct the Lieutenant before Russo could.
Stop doing my job!
"No, Commodore, Sir, we lost all contact with our pigeon torpedoes en route to Earth."
Garcia made his theatrical jump over the railing again, as if quick reactions would count now.
The pigeons were en route for a week and would take another seven weeks to reach Earth.
Young blood…
"Test the signal!"
Russo observed Garcia. The man loves puzzles.
"No good, Sir. I had a tech pull the link down in comms; the particle is gone. The pigeons are destroyed."
It had been Garcia's idea to put p-p links in pigeons and send them to Sol.
Russo cleared his throat.
"Are the other pigeons active?"
Both the Lieutenant and the Commodore looked at him like he had grown a second head.
"Ummm, no, Sir."
"Then the solution is simple: we sent five pigeons to Sol, five to Nekoo, five to Taishon Tar, and five to the Nuk homeworld. But only the ones en route to Sol stopped working."
"Sabotage?"
Garcia whispered the word.
"That, or something, or someone is trying to isolate Sol from the outside."
"But how do you destroy five pigeons in transit?" Garcia's murmur was full of disbelief.
Russo had an idea, but needed to check on it.
"Ares, please check the library files for 'Project Ballbearing.'"
Russo enjoyed the questioning look on Garcia's face.
A hologram appeared at the center of the command deck, displaying a single shining ball in space.
Ares, the systems AI, began to explain.
'Project Ballbearing, a theoretical area-denial weapon designed shortly after first contact with the Batract Hyphae, aimed at a large-scale defense against potential enemy fleets entering the Sol system.'
Russo pointed at the shimmering ball.
"To destroy a transit bubble, you need to either hit it with another transit bubble, or with a large enough mass."
Garcia walked around the hologram, reading the floating chemical analysis.
"Tungsten?"
Russo smiled.
"Correct. We can only travel in transit because the gravimetric shear in front of the bubble destroys everything smaller than, roughly, the ship's diameter."
Garcia blinked. Russo knew the Commodore was never a genius in FTL physics.
"Now, Project Ballbearing aimed to create a cloud of billions of two-centimeter pure tungsten balls, placed on Sol's boundary."
Garcia seemed to slowly understand.
Russo decided to speed things up.
"Tungsten is diamagnetic and heavy. It would survive the gravimetric shear, the plasma wave, and the magnetic field, and surf inside the gravimetric bow. After the large transit field collects a few thousand of the balls, the field would collapse due to imbalance."
"Destroying the ship, or, in our case, the pigeon."
Russo looked at the hovering ball.
Garcia had begun typing something on his dataslate. Then he looked up.
"Admiral, even by my most conservative calculations, to block every possible route between Burrow and Sol, hundreds of billions of… balls would be needed, the logistics of producing them—"
"—didn't you just explain to me how easy it is to print almost 2 million Nixtred frames? How much easier is it to print tungsten balls?"
Russo shivered. Simple balls could stop fleets.
"Give me Smith from the Magellan ; we need a way to break through this cloud. And find me a list of every ship leaving the system with a large cargo of tungsten."
"On it, Sir."
Garcia paused and then continued,
"The question is, who still knows of this defunct project?"
Russo knew everyone who still knew about the old plans.
He himself, Browner, Cermak, and Georgiou. The last remaining members of the old Admiralty…