Atlantia Series 2: Retaliator Read online

  ‘I’m fine,’ she replied as she pinned her long hair back, ‘really.’

  Evelyn realised during such moments how much she missed home, of how she wished that she did not have to confront these challenges. An image of Caneeron flickered like a phantom in her mind, the cold blue skies and glacial valleys, the deep forests and crystalline lakes that had been her home for most of her childhood, the chilly little world in orbit around Ethera’s parent star. Her parents, long gone, other losses too painful to bear just before the apocalypse struck and…

  She forced the memories from her mind.

  The steel mirror on the inside of Evelyn’s locker reflected her face. She was young, not yet thirty years of age, and she once again revelled in being able to look at her reflection. Not because she was vain, but because she was alive and her features were not concealed behind the damned metal mask that had hidden her face and her voice for so long.

  Her hair was long and flowing, naturally slightly curled, and her skin was clear and lightly tanned from her multiple recent training flights. Her eyes were green, and people had sometimes said to her that they were so wide and open that they felt as though they could see into her soul. A far cry from previous years when people had seen only the mask and had projected onto it their own personal and often fearful view of what Evelyn looked like.

  The mask was propped up at the back of her locker, watching her from the shadows. A memento from her past, a reminder of what the Word had reduced her to, of what it had done to her family… She shivered and slammed the locker shut.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ Andaim replied, clearly deciding to cut her a break as he fastened his uniform and hurriedly smoothed down his hair. ‘The captain will want to debrief you on the sortie and…’

  Andaim was cut off as a tannoy burst into life in the crew room.

  ‘All senior personnel report to the bridge, immediately!’

  Andaim and Evelyn exchanged a glance and then both turned and dashed for the elevator banks.

  ***

  II

  The Atlantia’s bridge was a hive of activity, tactically darkened and yet illuminated by a galaxy of lights from computer terminals and display screens. Crew stations governing the control and command of tactical, navigation, engineering and other essential roles surrounded the captain’s command platform, upon which sat Captain Idris Sansin.

  Sansin was a retirement–age commander who had been presented the captaincy of the Atlantia in the twilight of his career. The frigate, refitted as a prison ship, had been seen as a quiet back–corner command, a place to put a man whose authority and abrasive nature had often been a thorn in the side of the admiralty. Withdrawn from battle–ready status after a career highlighted by several actions against enemy vessels in combat, Sansin had surprised the navy’s hierachy by quietly accepting his last command and the remote location of its posting. Sansin had been too old to fight back against what had once been considered something of an insult; the command of a vessel buried in a dark back–corner of the colonies and charged with protecting the scum of society, its most violent and loathed offenders.

  Nearest to the captain sat his Executive Officer, Mikhain, newly promoted from his post as tactical officer in the wake of the victory over the Avenger, although due to a shortage of experienced hands aboard he still maintained his original posting. Older than many of the other hands, Mikhain was a native of Ethera like the captain and a man of the old school, suspicious of technology. His dark, short hair and quick, alert eyes matched a short but stocky frame.

  Sansin sat in his chair, his craggy chin cradled on the backs of his interlocked fingers as he scowled up at the massive display screen that dominated the bridge. A vast, dense asteroid field was silhouetted before the dim, lonely glow of a red dwarf star, one of countless billions populating the galaxy. But the captain was not focused on the stunning panorama outside his ship. Rather, his eyes were unfocused as he listened intently along with the rest of his crew to a scratchy, distorted signal being played back through speakers set into the walls of the bridge.

  ‘…. Adrift…. Supplies low… any call sign…. Beacon… can…. Try new… lost…’

  Scattered words broke through like errant thoughts adrift on a sea of static as Sansin tried to establish clearly in his mind what he was listening to.

  ‘Vector?’ he demanded.

  Lael, the Atlantia’s chief communications specialist, was leaning over her console and listening intently, her brow furrowed.

  ‘Quadrant two–stroke–seven, elevation minus–four–zero,’ she replied. ‘It’s very distant and I can’t accurately triangulate the signal, but it’s broadcasting on all distress frequencies.’

  ‘Could be anybody,’ Mikhain said, displaying his natural caution, ‘best we don’t rush into this with our eyes shut, captain.’

  Sansin listened as the faint message was replayed over and over again on a loop. The language was human, but it was not a human voice speaking: the Atlantia’s digital resonance transformers were automatically translating the dialect for the crew’s benefit. In a cosmos where some species spoke languages that could never be replicated by human vocal chords, or indeed could not even be heard by human ears, such devices had been a standard fit for all stellar–class vessels whether military or merchant.

  The species behind the distress signal had used short, terse sentences, deliberate and without cluttered dialogue.

  ‘They might have been running out of power,’ Sansin surmised, thinking out loud. ‘Either that or they were running out of time.’

  ‘Or both,’ said a voice.

  The captain turned and saw Andaim stride onto the bridge, Evelyn just behind him.

  ‘About time,’ Mikhain uttered and then glanced at Evelyn. ‘We’ll debrief you on your training sortie later. Right now, we have a situation.’

  Andaim slowed as his ear caught on to the transmission, and he listened for a few moments.

  ‘Distress channel?’ he asked and Sansin rewarded the commander with a nod, then waited to see what else he might deduce. ‘Short transmissions, foreign dialect, distress beacon’s been activated.’ Andaim turned to Lael. ‘Any other signals from it?’

  ‘No,’ Lael replied. ‘It may have run out of power. Judging by the weakness of the signal it could be weeks or even months old.’

  ‘Even if we’re too late to save any lives, we should take a look,’ Andaim said to the captain. ‘We need supplies of our own, and that asteroid belt out there doesn’t hold much except a few minerals. Our shuttles have scanned it for days and found no evidence of water ice.’

  The captain nodded and he glanced at the viewing screen as he spoke.

  ‘True, but the stumbling block for us is the species that sent the signal.’

  Evelyn felt a ripple of apprehension flutter inside her.

  ‘Have we identified it?’ she asked.

  It was Lael who replied from her station. ‘De–scramblers are sourcing the original signal code right now. Stand by.’

  The bridge crew waited as the ship’s computers crunched the translation code and reversed it to reveal the original dialect of the sender. Moments later Lael looked up at the captain, her face stricken.

  ‘Resonance reversal protocols identify the species as Veng’en.’

  The captain continued to stare at the viewing screen, betraying no emotion as he waited for somebody to speak. As captain his word was law aboard the Atlantia, but in such tough times with so few experienced hands available, he wanted his junior and senior officers to become used to acting upon their own initiative as much as possible, even in the face of a possibly fatal encounter.

  The Veng’en was a humanoid species that had evolved in an environment very different to mankind’s terrestrial homeworld, Ethera. A reptilian appearance did nothing to mask their war–like spirit, a species whose spacefaring abilities had been borne of endless conflict, the arms race of a thousand wars. Born on the hot, harsh world of
Wraiythe where jungles represented the safest habitat, evolution had thus favoured the strongest and fiercest among their kind to prosper, the most intelligent enslaved for the purpose of furthering the art of warfare and refining it into a hymn of wanton destruction unrivalled by any other species mankind had encountered.

  The Veng’en had fought several protracted conflicts against the human population of the colonies of Ethera and Caneeron, mostly territorial disputes that had ended in uneasy truces and endless rounds of political and diplomatic negotiations. The people of Ethera and Caneeron had spent many long decades living under the fear of a Veng’en invasion, which had been defended against by a large and expensive naval fleet in which Idris Sansin had been immeasurably proud to have served.

  Ironically it had not been a Veng’en invasion but mankind’s own remarkable technological advances that had seen his downfall, the voracious spread of the Legion engulfing Ethera and Caneeron and spreading far afield. Thus, had the Veng’en found themselves for the first time facing an implacable foe that even their ferocity and courage could not hope to defeat. Adopting a scorched–earth policy, they had distanced themselves from humanity’s collapse in the hopes of preventing the Legion from ever reaching them. Those few vessels that had escaped the Legion’s wrath and navigated their way toward the Veng’en homeworld had seen their vessels blasted into oblivion by their warlike and now fearful competitor species.

  ‘The Veng’en would not lightly broadcast a distress signal on all frequencies,’ Andaim said, jolting the captain from his reverie. ‘They’re too damned zenophobic.’

  ‘That’s what’s bothering me,’ the captain agreed. ‘Maybe in the time that we’ve been away the Veng’en have also fallen. Perhaps they had no choice?’

  ‘They had more warning than we did,’ Mikhain pointed out. ‘The Legion would not likely have been able to infect them en masse as it did humanity, so it would have been all–out conventional war instead if the Word took the fight to them.’

  The captain eased himself out of his chair and examined the nearby asteroid field.

  ‘For which they would naturally have blamed us,’ he said. ‘We created the Word, and now it is destroying them.’

  ‘Could it be just a fluke?’ Lael asked from her station. ‘Maybe the ship was part of a convoy that got lost or something? We can’t know if the Legion ever expanded beyond the colonies.’

  ‘It followed us all the way out here,’ Andaim replied for the captain. ‘Tyraeus Forge in the Avenger did not give up the chase. The Veng’en system is a damned site closer to Ethera than we were then.’

  ‘Agreed,’ the captain said. ‘That means they’re likely suffering as we once did. It may make them more welcoming of any assistance that we can offer.’

  A new voice appeared on the bridge.

  ‘Or it may make them hate us more than ever.’

  Councillor Dhalere was an exotic looking woman with dark skin, obsidian eyes and a confident stride. She walked onto the bridge as though she owned it, her long black hair flowing like glistening oil over her shoulders. The ship’s political officer and one of the few remaining establishment figures left aboard, she represented what was left of Ethera’s government.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Sansin nodded. ‘The question is: can we afford to miss the chance to find and ally others to our cause? We are but one ship against the Word.’

  ‘We’ll be one less ship if the Veng’en attack us,’ Dhalere cautioned. ‘You’ve already committed us to fighting one war, captain. I don’t think that we should risk starting another, do you?’

  ‘This isn’t about starting a war,’ Andaim said, ‘it’s about responding to a distress beacon.’

  ‘Which may be a trap,’ Mikhain pointed out in support of Dhalere.

  ‘You of all people know, captain,’ Dhalere said, ‘that the Veng’en will stoop to such tactics to draw in unsuspecting vessels.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sansin smiled without warmth, ‘but they wouldn’t advertise who they really are when doing so, would they now?’

  Dhalere’s expression did not falter but she did not reply either.

  Like the sailors of old who had plied Ethera’s great oceans in search of new lands centuries before, no call for help was ever ignored, be it sent by friend or foe. The vast expanses of space were as brutally cold and uncaring as any terrestrial ocean, and no man feared anything more than to be stranded alone to die in that immense vacuum.

  ‘Can we help, even if we wanted to?’ Dhalere pressed. ‘We can barely sustain ourselves and we haven’t seen a terrestrial planet for six months now. A few more weeks and it’ll be us sending the damned distress signal.’

  ‘All the better to move now then,’ Andaim said. ‘At least we won’t have given our position away by transmitting a signal. This way, we have a tactical advantage.’

  Dhalere’s almond eyes flared with irritation but the soft smile on her sculptured lips did not slip.

  ‘On your head be it, Commander Ry’ere,’ she purred.

  ‘No, councillor,’ the captain intervened. ‘It’ll be on mine.’ He turned to the helm officer. ‘Clear the debris field and alter course, engage maximum thrust.’

  ‘Aye, sir!’

  Dhalere cast the bridge a last, disapproving gaze and then turned and stalked from view.

  ‘She’s right,’ Mikhain said as the councillor left. ‘That ship could turn out to be a threat in itself.’

  ‘Which we won’t know until we get there,’ the captain said.

  ‘That’s a hell of a risk after what happened last time,’ Evelyn pointed out.

  The Atlantia had barely survived her battle with the Avenger and its infected captain, Tyraeus Forge, months before. It had been the first time anybody aboard the Atlantia had ever seen the Legion at work, an entire battle cruiser engulfed by billions of seething devices.

  Andaim peered at Evelyn. ‘What’s wrong? A few months ago you were the one screaming victory over the Word. Now you want to hide away again? We’ve never been stronger than we are now. This is the perfect time to make a move by choice instead of having our hand forced.’

  Evelyn kept her voice calm and hoped that her nerves were not showing through.

  ‘It’s too soon, we’re not strong enough.’

  The captain looked at Evelyn as a pulse of concern flared deep in his guts. Evelyn had awoken months before inside a per–fluorocarbon capsule, the victim of an assassination attempt by an agent of the Word after having been incarcerated for years for the murder of her family, a crime she had not committed. Within days, driven by an almost hellish thirst for vengeance, she had risen to control an entire army of convicts and then helped the captain and his crew take down the Avenger, the battleship that had hounded them for months across the cosmos.

  As far as the captain could make out, Evelyn feared no man, but she had been through hell at the hands of the Word both before and after the apocalypse.

  ‘I know it hasn’t been long,’ the captain said to her. ‘I know what Tyraeus Forge revealed to you aboard the Avenger, about what happened to your family, and that you nearly died. I’m not about to send you into another Legion–infested ship if you’re not ready.’

  Evelyn almost blushed, her green eyes blinking as shadows passed like ghosts behind them.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Just got a lot going on.’

  ‘Dismissed,’ he ordered her. ‘Get some rest, understood?’

  Evelyn saluted crisply and marched off the bridge.

  The captain gestured to Andaim, the commander following as the captain ascended a tight spiral staircase to a massive viewing platform that dominated the upper deck of the bridge. A circular dome of armoured and ray–sheilded glass afforded a spectacular, panoramic view of the universe.

  Outside the viewing platform the vast asteroid field was vanishing from view as the Atlantia began accelerating away, building up toward the tremendous velocities required to traverse the cosmos in any reasonable period of time. Within a short wh
ile she would be moving at close to half the speed of light, fast enough for her mass–drive to engage and propel the Atlantia to super–luminal velocity.

  ‘Evelyn’s not herself,’ Andaim said.

  ‘Who is, these days?’

  ‘She’s hiding something,’ Andaim pressed. ‘I don’t know what, but it’s bothering me.’

  The captain sighed and rested one hand firmly on Andaim’s shoulder.

  ‘She’s on our side, which is enough for me right now, and she’s under a lot of pressure with the flight training and everything she’s been through playing on her mind. Give her some space, Andaim, understood?’

  The commander nodded.

  ‘Can she be relied upon, do you think, if we encounter the Legion?’ the captain asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Andaim said. ‘But right now along with Bra’hiv, Qayin and a handful of Marines she’s the only human being aboard ship who has ever seen the Legion up close and personal. We, for better or worse, were too far from the apocalypse when it consumed Ethera.’

  ‘We need her,’ Idris replied. ‘Keep her alive Andaim, whatever happens, okay? There’s an awful lot hinging on what she does.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Andaim asked.

  ‘People know her, know what she did aboard the Avenger to protect the civilians, to protect us,’ the captain said. ‘Evelyn has become a sort of talisman for them, even a legend. Make her your priority, commander. I know how you feel about her – I’m sure it won’t be a problem for you.’

  The captain saw the commander manage to suppress his surprised expression as he whirled away and marched off the bridge.

  ***

  III

  Evelyn made her way down in the elevator banks toward the Atlantia’s hospital deck, located deep inside a heavily armoured section of the hull near the sanctuary. The sanctuary, or garden as the crew called it, was a central core of the ship that rotated to provide natural gravity and was filled with a lush valley that provided the crew with a place reminiscent of home, Ethera. Built for the prison crew who had once served aboard her as an antidote to the long tours far from home, it now served as the accomodation for the civilian survivors of the apocalypse.