The next day dawned on New Sonora with no sign of any enemy activity. It was the sort thing that usually meant Gabriel was going to have a good morning. Peace had been rare enough over the past three months that he was not about to complain. For once he did not have to worry that flaming chunks of rock would descend from the sky and incinerate him, along with everyone he cared about. He wondered how many people would take that kind of security for granted.
Gabe whistled as he walked down one of the broad avenues of New Sonora. The city bustled with life as people made their way to work or simply enjoyed the scenery. Many had the look of freshly arrived immigrants, pointing to the various buildings and landmarks with undisguised excitement. Just as many showed signs of the hardships the people of the Way had endured on their journey to this place. Clothes looked worn, and others had the occasional bruise or cut that had been given only hasty medical care. The families wandering the streets occasionally seemed to be missing a member: a father absent here, a mother there, or most heartbreakingly, a couple with a photograph of a missing child.
Gabe shook his head, his good mood suddenly dampened. The victories the fleet had won had been significant, but he wondered how much longer they would have to struggle before such sights were no longer common. He reached the hospital and made his way to his destination, hoping to catch his host in a relatively good mood.
Derek looked up and smiled as he entered the room. “Well hey, Mr. Angel. Nice of you to come down to earth to visit me.”
Gabe rolled his eyes. “Already heard about that, huh? Well, I’m sure it won’t be permanent. Someone’ll pull some stunt and they will get to be the talk of the city for a day.”
His friend shook his head, and the smile broadened. “I wouldn’t think so, Gabe. You heard they are starting to commission official squadrons of CTRs, right?” Gabe nodded, uncertain where the conversation was headed. Derek continued. “Did you hear what they plan to name the first one?”
Gabe stared at him for a moment. He shook his head. “No. You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope. They decided to call it the Iron Angels 1st squadron, in honor of the first mission flown by CTRs. The premier squadron of the CTR wing, named in the honor of the rig pilot who displayed such heroism, such courage, such death-defying derring-do!” Derek’s gestures grew more and more elaborate, and Gabe felt compelled to chuckle helplessly along with him. He just had to hope that this angel nonsense would fade away in time.
When Derek had settled back into his bed with a smile, Gabe glanced at his leg. “So when did they say you would get the chance to fly with us again? I heard they had already cleared you to walk around a bit.”
“Good question.” Derek’s face screwed up into a grimace. “I’ve been having a big…discussion with my doctors and nurses about that very subject. Seems they want to keep me here for more medical care and a few more tests before I get into a rig again.”
Gabe grinned. He could almost imagine the yelling matches that had to have taken place simply to keep Derek in the hospital bed rather than roaming the halls looking for trouble. “And how have they been doing on that front?”
Derek grunted. “Better than I would like. Nurse Rathers is mean as an angry dog with a sore tooth. When I tried to get up yesterday, she slapped me—actually slapped me!—on my leg. I nearly passed out.” He shifted a bit, and his look turned petulant. “Where did you find these people, anyway? It’s like they think I’m made of glass.”
“Well, maybe next time you’ll take better care of yourself and not get shot up so badly. Think of it as an incentive.”
“Yeah, right. I think you’re just bribing them to keep me here. You want those new CTRs all to yourself.” Derek’s face lost much of its disgruntlement, and he leaned forward. His voice was like a child on Christmas Eve. “So tell me, are they as good as everyone has made them out to be?”
Gabe grinned at his friend’s interest. “Better. They handle like a dream, and the firepower is everything we’ve always hoped for. You’ll love the extra tetherdrive power; it’s like you can ratchet up the speed to a whole new gear you never had before. And the maneuvering capability and extra armor certainly don’t hurt, either.” Gabe pulled over a chair and sat. “You’ll love them, Derek. Once you get out of here and calibrate one, at least.”
“Recalibration probably won’t be that much of a problem.” Derek’s chuckle returned and he gestured to the nearby wall, directly opposite his bed.
Gabe turned and examined it for a moment. The projection screen there had been modified, and when it hit him as to what the changes meant, his jaw dropped open. “How in the world did you convince them to put one of those in here?”
Derek shrugged. “The Lord always provides a way.” He grinned maniacally. “Sometimes He gives a bit more mundane help, though. The staff here got a bit fed up with my antics, and they figured that a rig simulator would settle me down a bit.” His friend reached down the opposite side of the bed and brought up a BCI helmet. “I’ve been running calibration tests on a CTR model. If I could just manage a link to a rig computer, I should be able to sync the programs and have a near-perfectly calibrated rig, ready to go.”
The determination in Derek’s voice was obvious, and Gabe shook his head. “You may not want to get back in the swing of things so quickly, Derek. It still gets pretty nasty up there, and it might get a whole lot worse before long.” He paused, hesitating over how much to share with his friend. “The Directorate might be involved soon, and you know how bad that can be for us, new rigs or not.”
A grim look swept over Derek’s face. “The Directorate? Has the Council officially started picking sides, then?” Gabe remained silent, and his friend continued. “I knew they would eventually. There are too many politicians looking for scapegoats, and the war is going too badly for us to stay clean forever.”
“We’ve sent a petition to the Council for adjudication, and we’re hoping that will slow the Directorate down a bit. Long enough for us to get out of here, anyway.” Gabe leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. “Chancellor Ripley and the Guard don’t seem like they want to wait, though. Guard forces are already gathering around the city, and the local defense network seems to be gearing up.”
His friend grunted sourly. “No surprise there. He’s been no friend of ours since we got here, and his election chances aren’t looking too solid. Better to get people to grind their axes for us instead of waiting for them to come for him. And we all know how much help the Guard’s been.” He shook his head slowly. “I need to get out of this bed and be doing something. The Lord didn’t mean for me to be sitting here while my friends are all out fighting.”
Gabe shifted his shoulders. “There might not be any fighting anyway, Derek. Give the Council the benefit of the doubt. It’s better for you to get well than to rush things and end up worse off than you were before.”
“Always the optimist, aren’t you, Gabe?” Derek settled back into his bed. “If anything starts happening, you come get me and we’ll plug me into a CTR. I don’t need to walk to work one of those things, and you’ll need every pilot you can get. Promise me.”
“Derek, you can’t just—”
“Promise me, Gabriel. I want to hear you say it.” Derek’s eyes grew hard. “Promise me.”
Gabe sat back in his chair, meeting his friend’s stare for a long moment. Then he nodded. “If there’s time, I will come get you. You can’t ask me to ignore a battle alarm to come here, though.”
Derek waved the qualification away with one irritated gesture. “Yeah, I know. But if there’s any chance I could be in on the action, you come here and you get me, you understand?”
“I understand.” Gabe sighed and looked down. Another promise to worry about. He only hoped the Lord would grant that this promise remained unfulfilled.
Just then his communicator chirped at him. He glanced down and sighed when he saw Delacourt’s name. “Sorry, Derek. It looks like my short break has come to an end.”
Derek smirked. “Is that the admiral I’ve been hearing so much about? I’m almost looking forward to meeting her.”
“I’ll let her know.” Gabe tapped in the activation code and tried not to sigh as Delacourt’s face appeared in the projection. She did not look happy, not even by her slim standards. “Gabriel here. What’s going on?”
“We have a situation. I need you en route to the central building immediately.”
“All right, I’m on my way.” He shut down the link and looked at Derek. His friend was watching him expectantly. “Looks like we might have an answer back from the Council.”
The other rig pilot’s eyes narrowed. “You sure it’s not a combat alert? I’m ready to go if it is.” Derek’s hands twitched on his bed sheets, and Gabe hurriedly shook his head.
“No, nothing like that. If it had been a fight, they would have called me to the Deliverance, not Dad’s office. It’s probably just a diplomatic cable or something.” He gave Derek a smile. “You’ll have to be patient a while yet.”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“Just don’t forget about me here, Gabe. You promised.” Then Derek settled back on the bed with a disgruntled huff of air. “Lord bless you on your journey, and I’ll see you around.”
“And may He bless you too, Derek.” Gabe stood and left. He hoped the news wasn’t as bad as Delacourt made it sound, even if there was little chance of that. At the very least, he hoped the admiral wouldn’t be in such a poor mood. Otherwise, it promised to be a very long day.
Susan looked up as Captain Gabriel entered. He seemed to be slightly wary, as if he already expected the news to be bad. It was a shame she would have to confirm that suspicion—he had been so happy the past few days. She gestured to the chair across the table from her. “Go ahead and take a seat, Captain. As I said, there is a situation we will need to discuss.”
Gabriel walked over to the chair and nearly fell into it. He looked at her. “What’s going on? Have the members of the Council already responded to our petition? I thought that would have tied them up for a month or two at least.”
“It appears their decision will soon be irrelevant, Captain.” Typing in a series of commands, Susan pulled up a projection of Eris and the objects in the planet’s close orbit. The Wayfarer fleet, the local defense station, and the newly arrived Directorate fleet were all clearly indicated. She zoomed in on the Directorate ships, adjusting the view so their course would be obvious. “Notice anything?”
He studied the images, as well as the projected course for the Concord and her accompanying ships. His eyebrows rose. “They aren’t going to stop off at the defense station? What are they doing?”
She shook her head. “It’s hard to say. The tradition of the Concord tour has been to stop above the capital of each world. That would usually mean at least a pass by the defense station belonging to the local Guard. The fact that it hasn’t can mean any number of things, but they are all highly suspicious.”
Susan paused, gathering her thoughts. The various scenarios branched out before her like moves on a chess board. “The first reason could be that the commander of the Concord group considers the local defense forces unreliable and does not want to hazard his ship by closing with them. Similar actions at Harrisburg and Anniston have made that possibility clear.”
Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “It would be handy if the Directorate flotilla actually displayed that kind of concern toward the Eris Guard, but even I don’t think that would be likely. If he had, he probably would have contacted us, especially since his course is going to take him directly over New Sonora.”
His words earned a simple nod of acknowledgment from her before she continued. “Correct. Secondly, the crew onboard the Concord has already received orders regarding our protection or destruction from the Council, and therefore do not need to stop near the defense station in order to complete their purpose in the system.”
He grunted. “If they had wanted to do either of those things, the Concord is probably the last ship they would send to do it for them. Especially with the Compass in tow. Both ships are simply too valuable to risk in open combat, and there isn’t exactly a shortage of other warships that could be diverted to clear us or the Eris Guard out.”
“And even in the unlikely event they had been given those orders, I still believe they would have directed their course toward the defense station first, either to gather reinforcements or to take out the most direct threat to their mission. You are right in discarding that option as well, Captain Miller.” She paused. “Option three. Some incident onboard the flotilla has rendered the ships unable to correct their course or communicate. Their current mistaken intercept is a pure result of error and malfunction, and could either be corrected or changed by the efforts of those onboard, or of rescue teams.”
Gabriel gave her a disbelieving look. “On all four ships? At the same time? And nobody has any opportunity to get the word out to the defense fleet or the planet? I don’t think so.”
Susan met his eyes with a level stare. “I am merely listing possible options, Captain. Unlikely or not, they could each be a situation we would have to deal with.” She glanced at the projection again, her next words seeming nearly as preposterous as the ones she had already said. “Fourth, the Concord is no longer under Directorate control. Either the independent actions of the flotilla commander, the persuasion of the hostile Keeper, or some other faction within their crew has led to a decision to eliminate or support us, and for that reason the ships are closing with the space above New Sonora.”
She saw Gabriel open his mouth to reject the option. He paused, and then closed his mouth. The rig commander considered the display for a long moment before he spoke. “Is that possible? There aren’t a whole lot of fleet officers willing to risk their careers on a move like that, but if we had one here, he could cause a whole lot of damage, petition or no.”
“True. While the capabilities of the four ships in the flotilla are less than frontline ships, they would create quite a large problem for us.” Susan tapped a key, and the details of the armament and compliment of the four craft spilled out on the projection below each ship. “The Concord alone has had a recent refit that allows it to deploy up to forty triple S rigs, while Compass, in spite of its non-combatant status, has a sensor suite stuffed into its hull that most battlegroups would envy. The light cruisers are easily a match for any of our ships as well.”
Gabriel nodded. “And if they force an engagement, we have suddenly declared war on the rest of the Known Worlds, and given our enemies a blank check to move openly. We’d have the Outriders, the Eris Guard, and the Directorate forces lining up to take us out.” He turned to look at her. “So how do you think we should stop them?”
She blinked. “What do you mean, how should we stop them? They have a remarkably superior position here, and we do not have a means to escape the trap they have set for us. Any response we make will result in their victory and our destruction. The wisest course would be to try to reach some sort of compromise with the person or persons in command of the Concord group and avoid the ensuing chaos completely.”
He tilted his head to the side. “And you think that sort of compromise is still possible?”
The question brought her up short. It was the same question that had been haunting her since the situation had developed. Without more resources or allies, her ability to negotiate would be incredibly limited. In fact, she was not sure she could even begin to convince the Directorate forces hold off their attack long enough for the Wayfarers to begin an evacuation. Slowly, Susan shook her head. “No, I don’t believe so.”
“So you either want us to surrender, which I think we agree would be foolish, or you want to see if I can come up with something you can’t.” It was not a question, but at the same time, his words lacked the smugness she had expected from him. Instead, he looked thoughtful, perhaps even a bit concerned as he studied the projection.
When Gabriel spoke, Susan felt something relax inside her, as if some of the tension had melted away. “You know, we have spent a while thinking about what they could be doing. Let’s look at the options the Lord has given us to see what can be done.”
She frowned slightly. “I suppose that might help. What possibilities do you see?”
Gabriel stood up and walked around to her side of the table. He tapped at the controls for a moment and zoomed the field of view out far enough to include the Wayfarer fleet. “All right, we have our fleet here above New Sonora. First off, we can launch an attack on the Directorate forces.”
Susan felt her hands clench. “That would be a disaster. It would just cause everything to happen sooner rather than later.”
“True, but at least we wouldn’t have to hang around and wait.” He smiled and shook his head. “You’re probably right, though. Next option. We try to evacuate with the ships we have before they get here.”
“Almost as bad. We don’t have the shipping capacity to get even half the people out of New Sonora yet, and even collecting that many ships would take too much time.” Susan tried to picture the frantic chaos, the panic as the Directorate closed in. “They would be on us before we completed the evacuation, and then we would be vulnerable to any move they made. And since the Epoch hasn’t arrived yet, we’d be stuck in this system or elsewhere in the Known Worlds. There would be no chance of a resonance burst to reach the uncharted systems.”
“Okay, so still not a good option. I’m guessing that attacking the Guard forces in advance of the arrival of the Concord is just as bad an option as the rest of them. Probably the same result as the other ones, right? And we can’t just let them through our lines; even if they don’t just straight-out attack us, they could rain shots down on us from orbit.” There was a hint of frustration in Gabriel’s voice now, and some small part of her enjoyed the fact that he was not finding her job nearly as easy as he must have expected. “What else could we do to keep them away from us?”
Susan laid a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “I’m not sure, Captain. Our options, as I have said, are rather limited. If the situation is as we have guessed it, then we have no real choice left to us.”
He shook his head, a motion that almost reminded her of a bull preparing to charge. “No. The Lord will always provide a way for His followers to do what they have to. There has to be something we’ve missed.” Gabriel pushed away from the table and began to pace, each movement betraying a surfeit of restless energy. She waited for a moment as he marched back and forth, his teeth clenched. The burst of energy leaked away from the rig commander, and his pacing wound down until he stood and stared at the projection. At last, he shook his head again, this time in resignation. “It’s too bad we aren’t wrong about the situation, right? I mean, if it was just all a mistaken course setting, we could use our ships to push them back into neutral orbit and we’d be the heroes. And we’d be glad to do it. But they have to try to destroy us.”
Still shaking his head, Gabriel slunk over to the seat he had occupied. His words still echoed in Susan’s head long after he had fallen silent. If they had mistaken the situation, if the ships had suffered an accident, what would they have done? The ships moved in her mind, their positions spread out to catch and redirect the stricken flotilla with gravitic tethers. It was a standard enough procedure that almost all of the navies in the Known Worlds had mastered it as a matter of course.
The plan continued to unfurl, move after move, detail after detail. If the flotilla commander had not checked with the Council, he would likely not have contacted the Defense Station. The Guard would be just as ignorant of the Concord group’s objectives as the Wayfarers. Not only that, but the commander would have to avoid contact, simply to promote an image of independence from central control. That way, the Council could feel free to disavow the mission, should it become unpopular, and the commander would not appear to be directly usurping their authority.
All of which would also have suggested a flotilla of ships in extreme distress, without the ability to communicate and on a severely mistaken course.
Susan considered her plan, a precisely woven series of maneuvers, counter-maneuvers and signals. It was a work of art, one still rough from the birthing, but ready to be purified and refined. Her plots would work well enough, and if the Directorate pressed the issue, her fleet would be ready. She turned to Gabriel and smiled. “Captain, I believe I have a possible plan of action. Thank you for your help.”
He glanced up in surprise. “You do? But what—how—”
“Let’s just say you were more of an inspiration than I could have hoped.” He blushed, and she chuckled to herself at his confusion. It was only fair to give some of that back to him occasionally. “Now, we will have a lot to do, Capatin. Here is what I need from you.” She began to outline her plan, and enjoyed the sudden restoration of hope to his expression. It was satisfying enough that she could ignore the protests that others, such as Colonel Mccalister, would make. Those protests would not matter for long, though. Soon, everyone would see why Susan Delacourt had been made the commander of this fleet. For everyone who meant to destroy the people she protected, she suspected that discovery would lead to a very bad day.