Barbarians at the Gates

Chapter Twenty-Five

FNS Midway, The Hive System, 4095

“Anything to report?”

“Negative, captain,” the sensor officer said. “The system is as quiet and dark as the grave.”

“It is a grave,” Roman pointed out dryly. The Midway was floating in space, twelve light minutes from the single Asimov Point, cloaked and watching through every one of her passive sensors. “Maintain a steady watch and continue to deploy passive sensing platforms. Inform me once all of the platforms have been deployed.”

He looked up at the star chart in the holographic tank and smiled. A fluke of astrometry had placed the Marx System alarmingly close to The Hive System, only a mere four light years apart. In the days before the continuous displacement drive, they might as well have been in separate galaxies, but now even a commercial-drive ship could cross that distance in a week.

It said something about the taboo most people felt regarding The Hive that relatively few shipping companies had taken advantage of the opportunity when the continuous displacement drive had been licensed for commercial starships. Even now, after so long, the system was abandoned. Or at least there were no signs of any habitats or starships. If some remnant of The Hive still existed, they were very well concealed. They knew what would happen if they showed themselves.

Just before the Inheritance Wars had begun, back during the political ferment that culminated in the Battle of Spider Bite and the start of the first war, a scout ship had stumbled through the Asimov Point and surveyed the system. Finding nothing of particular interest, the settlement rights had been sold to a development corporation, which had started to ship in settlers, industrial nodes and all the other equipment intended to help get a new colony settled and self-sustainable. The Bainbridge Protocols had been taken seriously in that age and the development company hadn’t stinted, even with the wars weakening the economy. The Hive—it had been called Morning Glory at the time—should have been a success.

Instead, a little surprise the scouting parties had missed had destroyed the entire colony and threatened the entire Federation.

It was hardly unknown for a life-bearing world never to develop an intelligent race and the survey crew had almost been grateful, for an alien race would mean surrendering their settlement rights to the Federation Alien Development Agency. They hadn’t noticed how…orderly the planet’s small animals had been—the planet hadn’t developed any larger animals—nor how they tended to stay well away from the human settlers. The animals might have been unintelligent, but the creatures that used them were alarmingly smart. The Hivers—tiny parasites that shared a group mind and infested living beings, controlling them once they took up residence in their brains—slowly took over the entire colony, and then the star system. The colony’s low tech base helped; the infestation wasn’t easy to detect and was impossible to remove.

By the time The Hive started sending out infection parties to other worlds, they owned the entire system. It was too late to do anything for the infected, even with the most advanced Federation medical technology.

They’d overplayed their hand, fortunately, and they’d been discovered long before they could infect most of the Federation. The Federation Navy had sealed the Asimov Point—luckily, The Hive hadn’t had access to real warships—developed a nanotechnological counter to the alien infestation, and invaded the system. Once the pitifully small defense fleet had been brushed aside, The Hive—and every other world in the star system—had been bombarded with antimatter bombs. The entire star system had been sterilised. There were still rumors that some infected humans had escaped on a starship, somewhere in the void of interstellar space, but nothing had ever been proven. The Hive was dead.

Roman settled back in his command chair, waiting patiently. Once the survey of the system was complete, they would proceed to another system, and then another, until they returned to the rendezvous point. He wasn’t expecting trouble, but he’d done everything he could to prepare for it. Besides, it kept the crew on their toes.

How quickly things could change, he mused. As a younger officer, he’d resented the endless drills, but as a captain, he appreciated them. He could not afford to allow his crew to become complacent.

Absently, he glanced down at the reports from the probes they’d launched towards The Hive, an action that had sent shivers of fear down the spines of some of his crew. RockRats didn’t suffer from taboos (at least, not the same taboos) as planet-born spacers, but Roman had to admit that they might have a point. The Hive had given birth to a deadly threat, one that could have proven lethal if they’d managed to infect more star systems before being discovered, and one that touched on humanity’s worst nightmares. It was one thing for humans to collaborate with alien invaders, but quite another to face the prospect of losing all individuality and merging into a hive mind.

“Captain,” the communications officer said suddenly. “I’m picking up a distress beacon, bearing…”

Roman swung around in his command chair and scowled at the display. There hadn’t been anything there a moment ago, but that proved nothing. The problem with passive sensors was that they could only pick up objects that were actually emitting energy signatures. A starship that shut down all its drives and sensors would be effectively invisible, a needle in a haystack the size of a planet. And if it was emitting a distress signal…his mind raced, considering possibilities. No warlord, he was sure, would stoop to the level of using a distress beacon to lure in an unwary starship, but pirates had been known to do so. They were already dead if they fell into Federation hands, so what did they have to lose?

And if it was a real distress beacon, they had a moral duty to respond.

“Helm, set course to home in on the beacon,” he ordered. The distress beacon was nearly forty light-minutes away. Whatever had happened, he reminded himself, had taken place forty minutes ago. A battle between two starships would be very hard to detect at that range. “Keep us under cloak. I don’t want them seeing us if it is a trap.”

“Aye, sir,” the helmsman said.

Midway hummed slightly as she turned in space and set a new course towards the source of the distress signal. It would take over an hour to reach the beacon, by which time it might all be over. The Federation insisted that all starships—particularly civilian craft—carried lifepods and emergency shuttles, but The Hive was almost always deserted. There shouldn’t have been anyone to come to the rescue.

His XO’s face appeared in the small display.

“Kind of an odd coincidence,” Janine pointed out. “We get here, then something decides to happen.”

Roman had been having similar thoughts, especially due to the nature of travel through the Asimov Points. It was theoretically possible to see a cloaked ship just as it came out of the Asimov Point, but whoever observed it would have to be in exactly the right place at the right time to do so, and the odds were vanishingly small.

“We were in the system for nearly a day before they set off the distress beacon,” Roman countered, even though he appreciated Janine’s thoughts and suggestions, as she had more practical experience than he did. “We have no idea what the traffic through this system is like in wartime.”

ONI’s intelligence had suggested, quite seriously, that The Hive was being used as a transit point for smugglers and pirates. Roman couldn’t fault the logic, particularly if smugglers were working with the warlords. Even so, they’d have to be careful about operating too blatantly in the system, not when half the planets in the sector would refuse to allow them to dock if they knew that they’d been anywhere near The Hive. It wasn’t particularly logical—not when there was little chance of infection unless they actually landed on the dead homeworld. Yet humans had never been logical creatures. Apart from the Hooded Sect, who tried to embrace lives of logic and reason, somewhere out on a hot desert world no one else wanted.

“True,” Janine agreed. “Still, best to be careful. They may have no idea what they’re trying to trap.”

“No argument,” Roman agreed. “We’ll assume that we’re heading into a trap and prepare to face the enemy when they show themselves.”

The minutes ticked by slowly as Midway inched across the star system towards the squawking distress beacon. Roman had to fight the urge to stand up and pace on his bridge, knowing that it would upset the crew if they thought that the Old Man—which was a joke, given that he was the youngest captain in the Navy—was nervous or fearful. It struck him, not for the first time, just how vast space truly was, even though Asimov Points could take them from star system to star system virtually instantly. It could still take hours to respond to any emergency within a star’s mass limit.

Roman ordered the launch of a stealth drone as soon as they entered range, trusting that the drone—using passive sensors—would pick up enough signs of a waiting ambush to allow the ship to escape before any trap might be sprung.

“I’m picking up residue traces of weapons fire,” the sensor officer said suddenly. “It reads out as fairly standard plasma fire, perhaps from old-style pulse cannons. No trace of nuclear or antimatter warheads.”

Roman looked up at Janine’s face and knew that she shared the same thought. Pirates.

“Take us in,” Roman ordered harshly. Images of his dead parents danced before his eyes. “Set condition-one throughout the ship. Prepare for engagement.”

Alarms howled as Midway went to battle stations, ready for anything.

“Captain, the source of the distress beacon is coming into visual range,” the sensor officer said. “She’s no warship.”

“All stop,” Roman ordered. “Put her on the main display.”

He sucked in his breath as the image appeared in front of him, a long, swan-like starship spinning helplessly in space. The White Swan liners were ships the Federation’s rich and powerful took on holidays, sailing from star system to star system while enjoying the finest in food and hospitality. Roman had grown up hearing stories about how passengers were treated on such liners, stories that hadn’t grown much in the telling. A third-class ticket on the liner would have cost more than he made in a decade. And now one of those liners was in front of his ship, its white hull marred by the dark scars of direct hits where energy beams had burned into the hull. She was dead in space.

“Helm, take us on a slow circuit around the ship,” Roman ordered. If it was a trap—which looked increasingly unlikely—they’d spring it. “Sensors…report.”

“Apart from the distress beacon, the ship appears to have lost all power and atmosphere,” the sensor officer reported slowly. “There may be safe locks within the ship preserving some of the passengers and crew, but we can’t detect them at this distance.”

And they might well have run out of air, Roman thought. What the hell were they doing in this system, for God’s sake?

“Hold us in position,” he ordered. He keyed his intercom to the Marine channel. “Major Elf, are your men ready to board the stricken ship?”

“Aye, sir,” Elf said. She sounded the same as always, but he knew she must be as hungry for vengeance as he was. Pirates and Marines were natural enemies; the latter were often the first to see what the former had left of their victims. “Request permission to launch.”

“Permission granted,” Roman said. “Good luck.”

It took the Marines two hours to search the liner Harmonious Repose, out of Harmony, but they’d sent back images from their combat suits as soon as they entered the torn and battered hull. It was a sickening sight. Space combat was normally clean and sterile, yet the pirates hadn’t been content to loot the hull and kill the passengers. They’d boarded, stormed the ship, and captured every surviving passenger and crewman. The male crew had been taken down to the ship’s gym and summarily shot; the female crew had been raped, then shot. The liner’s captain had been found, mutilated and castrated. There were no survivors.

For a time, Roman had held out hope that some of the passengers may have found refuge in a safe lock. But Elf reported that the pirates had burned through the armor and taken the passengers.

The mystery deepened when Roman looked up the service record of Harmonious Repose. According to the Federation Shipping Register, the Harmonious Repose had been in the Harmony System a few months before Admiral Justinian had launched his attack on Earth and had never been seen since. ONI’s report had assumed that the liner—like other commercial ships in Admiral Justinian’s territory—had been pressed into service as a supply ship. But the evidence now suggested otherwise.

It made no sense.

Why would Admiral Justinian allow a starship with wealthy passengers—and no military capability—to travel through the badlands of space? And, come to think of it, what was it doing anywhere near The Hive?

As the ship’s computers had been destroyed, ostensibly by the pirates, Elf’s Marines had to do some digging to find the ship’s emergency datacore. Her best computer specialist used Federation Navy codes to break into the system. It wasn’t particularly informative, at least on the surface, but the intelligence team working on the datastream uploaded by the Marines were able to draw some conclusions. The liner had been berthed in Harmony for the first two years of the war, and then she’d been pressed into service—finally sent on a route that would have, eventually, taken them out of Justinian’s territory. The standard shipping logs, which should have held a full explanation, including a reason for their flight, hadn’t been updated in years.

It was almost as if the ship had been retired, and then brought out of retirement for one last mission.

The forensic teams turned up another riddle. The ship’s official crew had, of course, been listed in the Federation Shipping Registry. It didn’t entirely surprise Roman to hear that most of the crewmen located by the Marines—their DNA sampled by remote drones—weren’t on the crew manifest. Even odder, some of them had been Federation Navy personnel in the Harmony System who had—presumably—signed up with Admiral Justinian. Was he looking at the remains of an escape attempt, or something else? The handful of passengers located by the forensic teams—killed in the attack, Roman assumed, as wealthy passengers could be ransomed back to their relatives—were people he assumed would have supported Justinian, those who could be identified at all. And they’d clearly followed communication security protocols. They hadn’t written anything down about their mission, as far as the Marines could tell.

Under normal circumstances, Roman knew, the ship’s hulk would have been towed to the nearest planet and the Federation Navy would begin a full investigation while notifying the relatives of the murdered crewmen. That was hardly a possibility at the moment, not with two warlords in the area who wouldn’t be inclined to cooperate with the Federation Navy. It was possible that they could use the liner as a source of spare parts, but that would mean transporting her to the Golden Hind and the Fleet Train when Admiral Mason arrived. But that would have to wait.

“Elf, deactivate the distress beacon and pull back your teams,” he ordered. Unpowered and silent, the hulk wouldn’t be detected unless a patrolling ship literally stumbled over it. The odds were vastly against discovery. “We’ll keep the records, perhaps relay them to the warlords if they are disposed to cooperate, or inform the shipping companies once we leave the sector.”

“Understood,” Elf said crisply. “We’re on our way.”

“The admiral won’t approve of sending any kind of notification to the warlords,” Janine’s voice whispered through his earpiece. “We are at war with them, you know.”

Roman nodded sourly. “I wasn’t going to send them a message with an ID header,” he told her. “We’ll have to leave it until we leave the sector, or unless our presence is discovered. The hulk can wait…”

“Captain,” the sensor officer said. “I’m picking up a single ship in the system, heading away from us!”

“Show me,” Roman ordered.

A red icon blinked into life on the display.

“Why didn’t you pick it up sooner?”

“They were lying doggo,” the sensor officer reported. “They only just lit up their drive.”

Roman did the math in his head. Elf had deactivated the distress beacon three minutes ago. The enemy craft had lit its drive just after it would have heard the distress signal terminate, tipping them off that someone had found the wreck. Distress beacons were designed to remain operational unless the hulk was completely vaporized.

“Helm, bring us about,” he ordered. “Take us in pursuit.”