It turns out that even during disaster, effective delegation can really rob a leader of things to do, especially in a place like Polaris. With less than two hundred thousand inhabitants, the colony produced less paperwork than a mid-sized company on the Republican Stock Exchange. The governor need only make the toughest decisions.
With all the work delegated, Governor Katrina Polk was left examining the sensor returns of the Akritan Fleet. Only passive sensors, of course, because for all they’d done to save Polaris, Katrina was in no mood to sour the mood by painting a warfleet with active sensors.
Not that she needed to. The warships had active transponders and had docked in nearly the same orbit as the station, close enough that simple telescopes could spot details as small as a hatch on one of the cruisers.
“Cruisers my ass…” Katrina mumbled, equal parts frustrated and awed.
A top-of-the-line Hegemony heavy cruiser was about six hundred meters long, and one hundred and forty kilotons in weight. One Peacekeeper-class heavy cruiser cost nearly two billion aurums to build, and a hundred million to operate for a single cycle.
The ships had no real equal, as most cruisers were built five hundred meters long and a hundred and twenty kilotons heavy. The only ships bigger than a Peacekeeper were battleships, battlecruisers and the handful of dreadnoughts that remained in service to the major polities since the Rapture. Short of a capital ship, Peacekeepers were the worst thing that could knock on one’s orbital doorstep.
‘Until now.’
The ANS Whitefang was eight hundred meters long, weighed one hundred and sixty kilotons, and the Duke had two such ‘cruisers’ in his service. The three five hundred meter long ‘Destroyer-Leaders’ and the two hundred and fifty meter long ‘Frigates’ also had to be mentioned. And, of course, the one thousand, one hundred and fifty meters’ worth of battlecruiser…
Of course, battlecruisers tended to be sub-kilometer ships, and the one she was looking at was almost as big as a republican Senator-class battleship, but that fact apparently didn’t matter to whoever had named these war machines.
“Where the fuck did you come from?” She whispered, thinking back on the blond-haired, amber-eyed young noble that had saved her colony without breaking a sweat.
“Uh, ma’am?” A questioning voice interrupted her thoughts.
“I wasn’t…!” Katrina nearly yelped, before turning towards the speaker.
Her secretary was knocking on the door of her office.
“Enter.”
The young lady entered with her tablet in hand, her expression…strange.
“What is it, Joanna?”
“Well, the…uhm…the Duke has sent a message. Addressed to you, specifically.”
“Thank you.” Katrina promptly took the offered tablet, laser focused on finding the message recording. “You can close the door behind you.”
“Yes ma’am…” A slightly miffed secretary left the room, her hopes of a scoop dashed.
It took only a few moments for her to find the message. No audio, no video, just plain text.
{You are cordially invited to dine and discuss with Duke James Akrites, this evening at 1900 hours / six hours from now.}
“Eh?”
—
ANS Vanguard’s Hymn flew alone in her parking orbit, a spear of dark gray metal, her broadsides decorated with rows of gleaming and glimmering dots.
At first she looked like a model, like the ones Katrina had built during her childhood. The entire thing looked small enough that she could fit it in her palm, but as the pinnace drew closer the capital ship swelled and swelled seemingly without stop. From how she slowly turned into a proper ship; Katrina could’ve easily mistaken her for a mere frigate or light destroyer at this range. And then she grew and grew, until she’d reached the size befitting the name ‘battlecruiser’.
From shimmering dots, her weapons bays grew into maws that could swallow the pinnace whole. Sensor bulbs, gravitic sensor masts and point defense arrays came into sharp definition. Five drive bells sat embedded deep in her rear hammerhead, surrounded by thick armor plating and a crown of shield generators.
She was truly huge, more than a kilometer dedicated in its entirety to war. Katrina’s eyes drank every little detail along the hull, sleek and arrogant by the very nature of her purpose. An ‘assault battlecruiser’, whatever that was supposed to—
Her thoughts broke off as the viewscreen turned black, the pinnace slowing down to maneuver into one of the battlecruiser’s cavernous hangar bays. Seconds and then minutes ticked down as the shuttle docked.
Sergeant Wulfe gestured something to one of the marine escorts closest to the ramp, who promptly got up and pressed a big, red button. In true marine fashion he slammed it with the side of his clenched fist instead of merely pressing it. Katrina smiled; marine culture tended to stay the same.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
A low klaxon blared, warning the pinnace’s passengers of the descending ramp. It touched down on the bay floor with a low thunk.
“After you, ma’am.” Sergeant Wulfe gestured down the ramp with an earnest smile, having taken his helmet off. Katrina nodded in acknowledgment.
Already six of the marines had stepped down, forming two echelons on each side of the ramp. It made Katrina wonder just how much ceremony she’d have to go through, hoping not to mess things up; she’d heard nobles tended to be critical of a person’s decorum.
Wulfe walked in parallel with her, Paula and Crane flanking her while the last three marines brought up the ‘rear guard’.
With shouted command sounded as they stepped off the ramp, followed by the whistling tones of a wind instrument. At Wulfe’s direction they walked until a plain white line on the floor, then turned to face the side party awaiting them.
An honor guard of marines, their dark blue uniforms visibly decorated with ranging amounts of accolades and even medals, stood at attention along the bay’s transverse bulkheads. Katrina hardly knew how many such a warship carried by design or doctrine, but there looked to be dozens, maybe even a hundred, present.
Another block of sailors stood by the longitudinal bulkhead, while another, smaller block of senior officers waited just beyond the side party headed by two young men. The one to the left she didn’t know, but the right one she instantly recognized as the Duke himself.
“Permission to come aboard, sir?” Her mouth moved on instinct, moved by the familiar situation.
“Permission granted, madam.” The unknown man, who she now knew was the warship’s captain, replied as the instrument’s whistling tone died down. His accent, like the Duke’s, was soft yet clear, carrying just a tinge of his surprise.
“T-Thank you.” Katrina stepped across the line on the deck, formally boarding the ship. Sergeant Wulfe followed at her left shoulder, her two compatriots coming up to her right.
“Captain Jenkins, madam.” The captain shook her hand with a curious smile. “Welcome aboard the Vanguard’s Hymn. And may I formally introduce my liege, the Duke Akrites, first of his name.”
The Duke looked a full two meters in real life, the smile on his clean-shaven face conveying a sense of calmness and stability. His shoulders were broad, fitting perfectly in his dark blue uniform.
For a moment Katrina thought to bow, but then the duke extended his right hand, clad in a white glove. Firmly clasping it, she shook it with a light smile.
“It’s good to finally meet you, my lord.” She said
“Likewise, Governor. I do hope my marines treated you well.” The young lord quipped, sounding rather…possessive of the soldiers.
“Yes, they were very…courteous.” Katrina struggled, trying to use rich vocabulary. Was that the proper way to talk to nobility?
The Duke’s eyes twinkled for a moment, but then he made a swift gesture with his other hand. Two officers stepped forward, looking slightly older than the lord.
“Commander Noriega, my chief of staff, and Lieutenant Commander Webb, my logistics officer. They will be joining us for dinner.” He explained, looking at Katrina’s own entourage.
Katrina gestured to the pair of true-blooded civilians by her side, who looked ever-so-slightly uncomfortable in this deeply military setting. “Crane Bishop, my chief of mining operations, and Paula Styles, my deputy chief engineer. Unfortunately all other senior colonial personnel are…preoccupied.”
“Understandable.” The duke nodded, his expression apologetic. “Hopefully we’ll be able to remedy that soon enough, among other things.” He hinted, making another gesture, to Sergeant Wulfe.
The marine nodded lightly. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you would please follow me to the Admiral’s stateroom.”
—
As the six of them sat down in lush chairs inside the duke’s receiving room, Katrina felt she had to speak. She was experienced enough in negotiations and politics —the scars of her previous life— to understand that the young noble was in a prime position to dictate terms. She wouldn't —couldn’t— refuse him, but by taking the lead she might be able to make his demands more reasonable. As a plus, she really was burning with curiosity.
“Would you be amenable to answering a question of mine, your lordship?”
The duke nodded. “Please, speak freely.”
“Where are you from?”
The atmosphere in the room instantly shifted to a more serious tone. The duke’s expression was thoughtful, gears turning in his head.
“I will tell you, though you may not believe me.” He chuckled, a rather bitter smile forming on his face.
Katrina and her advisors unconsciously shifted forward, focused on his next words.
“Do you know of the Imperium of Nova Roma?”
“I…don’t believe I do.” Katrina shook her head, turning to her advisors who simply shook their head. “Enlighten us.”
“There isn’t much to enlighten with. I could speak about six hundred years of politics and war, but there is little to be gained. But I should tell you that my dynasty had been a part of the Imperium —albeit a small one— for the past four centuries. That ended some…five or six standard days ago. We lost a…well, I suppose you could call it an internal conflict. In reality it was a war, however small by the standards of the Imperium.”
Katrina racked her brain for any clues, but what she was hearing was truly foreign. If the duke and his fleet were a ‘small’ part of this polity, then the Imperium would have to be as a major player in the sector. Yet try as she did, she couldn’t remember anything resembling an ‘Imperium’.
“I’m sure that you’re trying to remember if you’ve heard about the Imperium, but I doubt you will. Maybe, maybe, you would find mentions in history books. For you, those events were over a millennium ago.” The duke confessed, his tone melancholic.
“I…what?” Katrina sputtered, her mind short-circuiting. “How?”
“In the Imperium, it is —or was— tradition for defeated nobles and their loyalists to be exiled into the void. A sub-light journey in stasis, to some far away colonizable system. That way both parties ‘win’.” The duke air-quoted. “The victor gets rid of possible rebels and dissidents, and the loser is allowed to start anew instead of facing a firing squad.”
Katrina slowly understood his explanation, shocking as it may be. However, there was still one small detail missing…
“And the jump? If you were moving at sub-light speeds, how did you appear in orbit out of the void. Only a hyperspace accident could cause such a…displacement.”
“Ah, that’s where it gets interesting.” The duke chuckled. “I still have a hard time believing it myself, but I trust my experts.”
“We were…a bit too trusting in the law.” He frowned. “Exile dictates that one must first perform a hyperspace jump into the void between stars, from where as you know a hyperdrive can’t take you back home, so that there is no going back. As we were about to do just that, our enemies attempted to ambush us. In our attempt to escape, we jumped prematurely. The matter-antimatter reaction hadn’t calmed down, and the power surge caused a momentary crash in the drive computers. I hope you understand how dangerous such an act is.”
Katrina nodded, grimacing. Hyperdrives were not only capable of opening a rift into hyperspace, but using specialized computation systems could do so accurately. Should said systems crash or be bypassed, ninety-nine times out of a hundred the ship never returned into realspace.
“We should have died there and then, but we didn’t. Instead, my astrogator believes the hyperdrive took the entire fleet within a hair’s breadth of a black hole’s event horizon. I daresay that was the most powerful slingshot maneuver ever performed. After all, the Imperium is inside the Cygnus-Orion Arm of the galaxy, not the Perseus Arm.”
Katrina felt her tongue grow cold as air flowed in through her gaping mouth.