The Tabit Genesis (32 page)

All throughout the evolution of weapons technology, the fundamental objective of combat has remained the same: deliver some quantity of force to a specific location at a precise moment in time. When applying that principle to scales on the order of solar systems, the distances and velocities involved provide ample opportunity to manufacture apocalyptic destruction.

The Battle of Brotherhood left millions of individual bits of shrapnel hurtling through space at blistering speeds. From grains of scrap to freighter keels a kilometre in length, every fragment was a lethal satellite packing a terrifying amount of kinetic energy. The largest such concentration of debris was trapped in high, unstable orbits around the moon Lethe, slowly pulling away towards Zeus. The second largest field was close to the inner boundary of the Belt itself, where the Navy had clashed with Ceti and mercenary privateers, and where Wyllym had made his name as a warrior.

With the right timing – and an added quantity of directional thrust – a body forced from either debris cloud could intersect with orbits in the Inner Rim. Had their contents been catalogued only months ago, even a casual observer today would have noticed a substantial loss of inventory.

The opening shots of the Archangel War were not fired from cannons; they were fired from the depths of history. In one last stab from the grave, the ghosts of Brotherhood lashed out, slamming their dead, twisted starships into Navy targets with enough force to atomise metal.

*

Wyllym was aboard a Navy Police gunship when he learned the war had begun.

‘
Fuck
,’ Augustus fumed, banging a heavy fist against his knee. ‘Another Big Eye just died.’

Three hours earlier, Wyllym had been awakened in his cell by a middle-aged soldier dressed in a combat exosuit who identified himself only as ‘Mike’. He had brought a Gryphon flight exosuit with him; the electronic nametag embedded within would identify the wearer as one Lieutenant Vronn Tarkon.

Mike was quiet but moved with urgency, speaking only to issue terse instructions to other guards. They journeyed to Corinth’s hangar bay, where they were met by Augustus and twenty police Omniwar Specialists. These soldiers, called OMSPECs, had been wearing combat exosuits nearly identical to Wyllym’s and were carrying enough firepower to level a city block.

‘Rail fire?’ Wyllym asked, squirming. Outside of a Gryphon, his flight suit was uncomfortable and cumbersome, especially within the confines of the Navy gunship. It dawned on him that the exosuits everyone was wearing reflected the grim likelihood that they would all end up in space at some point.

‘Collision,’ Augustus spat, pressing his earpiece in as he listened to the comm chatter. Like the other soldiers, he was wearing mechanised ballistic armour.

Wyllym had to turn his shoulders to look at him.

‘With what?’ he repeated.

Augustus tapped his earpiece.

‘The ONW
Auckland
, apparently.’

Wyllym blinked.

‘The
Auckland
was lost at Brotherhood twenty-five years ago.’

‘That is correct,’ Augustus said, handing him his corelink. ‘Here.’

The former Navy frigate had been one of the last pre-colonial UNSEC designs in the fleet, refitted a dozen times and scheduled to be decommissioned. Its hull was conspicuously unique among the arsenal of modern warships; a flying crucifix in which each arm was a rotating engine and its ‘head’ was the primary weapons bay.

A Navy captain assigned to patrol the Big Eye platforms between Eris and the Belt witnessed the
Auckland
– what was left of her – hurl past his position on its way to impacting with the sensor post, utterly pulverising it and the eight-man crew stationed there. Radar logs confirmed that it was indeed the
Auckland
that had struck the fatal blow.

‘Big Eyes aren’t the most agile things,’ Augustus grumbled. ‘Point defences popped off a few rounds. About as effective as throwing turds at a mech.’

Wyllym was incredulous. Five Big Eyes had vanished in the last twenty minutes. Somehow, they had missed an incoming spread of junkyard buckshot a hundred kilometres across whose contents included a
frigate
.

‘This is impossible,’ he said, reading the captain’s report. ‘Those mirrors are half a click wide, they should have seen this coming from—’

‘“Should” and “have” are the operative words there,’ Augustus said, unholstering his sidearm and making sure a round was chambered. ‘Right now I’m wondering if they ever worked at all.’

Wyllym eyed the weapon.

‘You don’t think you’re going to need that, do you?’ he asked.

‘Getting you into a Gryphon might require some persuading,’ Augustus answered.

Wyllym opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it.

‘What?’ Augustus asked.

‘Nothing, this is just …’ Wyllym started. ‘I’m a soldier of Orionis, for God’s sake.’

‘You were,’ Augustus corrected. ‘Now you’re an enemy of the state.’

‘What does that make you?’

‘An oath keeper,’ Augustus said.

Mike’s eyes were closed as he listened to the chaos on the comm channels. The general alarm had been sounded – all Navy personnel were reporting to battle stations, and the
Archangel
was priming her engines to leave port.

The Gryphons, now following orders directly from Admiral Hedricks, were preparing to scramble.

‘You can’t persuade anyone that I’m Vronn Tarkon, even with that,’ Wyllym said.

‘You two are the same height, the rest is easy,’ Augustus joked. ‘Relax, my techs put a filter in your mask. You’ll modulate to sound just like him. Just keep the damn helmet on.’

The gunship rotated on its wing several degrees; Wyllym felt the retro thrusters fire. They were close.

‘Where is Vronn now?’ Wyllym asked.

‘On his way to the medbay with a very serious medical condition.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a diversion,’ Augustus said. ‘Gave him a pill to take. The medbay personnel are mine and telling Hedricks he’ll be good to go momentarily. Flight ops is holding his wing on deck, so we’re in great shape.’

The pilot interrupted him on the intercom.

‘Sir,
Archangel
Harbour Control is challenging us,’ she warned. ‘You’re up.’

Wyllym froze. Augustus snatched his corelink out of his hands.

‘Control, this is Commander Tyrell, Navy Police,’ Augustus growled. ‘Let us on board. Government business.’

‘Your craft is not on the flight manifest—’

‘We are boarding the
Archangel
by order of the Chancellor on official government business. Clear our approach or you’ll be in a brig.’

A different voice jumped on the channel.

‘What’s with the hardware, Commander?’

‘Chancellorship orders to take Vladric Mors
alive
, if possible. We’ll brief Hedricks on board.’

‘Cleared two-two-west.’

‘
Thanks
.’

Wyllym exhaled nervously as the gunship executed another turn.

‘You’re not remotely worried about this?’ he asked.

‘I’ve spent the last thirty years infiltrating Ceti,’ Augustus said. ‘I’m sure I can sneak you onto a Navy ship.’

Wyllym nodded towards the soldiers, most of whom were leaning back in their armour catching some last-minute rest.

‘Then why do they need to be here?’

Augustus smiled.

‘Like I said, for the possibility of taking Vladric Mors alive,’ he said. ‘Make him face justice.’

Another burst of deceleration rattled the hull. Wyllym didn’t feel like he was about to land on a friendly ship. He felt like he was readying to invade a hostile one. The
Archangel
’s
looming, colossal,
alien
appearance was more menacing than ever before: its ebony armour was glowing white in places as energy coursed through it, and the massive rings in the centre were spinning in counter-rotational directions as occasional electrostatic arcs ran up the four towers.

Wyllym still had trouble accepting that this was a ship at all. Even with the mothership classification, the
Archangel
was just
huge
; it seemed larger than Corinth itself. As the gunship aligned with an open hangar bay, he could see orderly processions of shuttles and freighters approaching other hangar bays on the ship, their navigation lights casting hull strobes all the way back to Able Station.

‘Personnel transfers,’ Augustus remarked. ‘The beast is getting her crew. Couldn’t ask for better timing. It’s going to be crowded down there.’

Gravity tugged on his muscles as the gunship flew past the mysterious barrier into the
Archangel
’s hangar. For the first time that he could recall, Wyllym wished he was in a Gryphon right now. The world just made more sense from the inside of a cockpit.

‘Ready up, OMSPEC,’ Augustus announced, and the soldiers awoke to immediate alertness, stood up and grunted enthusiastic ‘hoo-ahhs’ in unison. The gunship had landed. ‘Move out!’

‘You’ll remain here with Mike for ten minutes while the rest of us secure the medbay,’ Augustus said. ‘Then he’ll take you to us, and then escort you to the flight deck. We’ll be able to communicate through your helmet. If you’re addressed by anyone else, keep your answers short, and
relax
before you speak – the modulator can’t keep up with fast talk. You can disable it anytime by saying the code word “
viceroy
”.’

‘Why that word?’ Wyllym blurted.

Augustus lightly slapped him in the head.

‘Because there’s zero chance it will come up conversationally,’ he said. ‘The flight deck is expecting Vronn Tarkon to leave the medbay any moment. We’re sending you out instead.’

‘What’s going to happen to Vronn?’

A hint of graveness crept into Augustus’s bravado.

‘I need to get him off this ship,’ he said. ‘You alright?’

Wyllym exhaled forcibly, shaking his head.

‘We came all this way to kill Vladric Mors,’ he muttered. ‘Why do I feel like we’re going after the wrong man?’

Augustus regarded him for a moment.

‘No wonder they put you in jail,’ he said, offering his hand. ‘Good luck, man.’

Wyllym shook it.

‘You too.’

The airlock opened, and Augustus was through.

With a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and a toxic layer of fine dust coating the entire planet, the planet Eris was uninhabitable, despite its prime location in the circumstellar habitable zone of the Orionis sun. Yet Vulcan Industries had invested heavily here, manufacturing biodomes for food production and deep core drilling sites to harvest precious metals and common ores.

The vast industrial infrastructure made for ample business opportunities with privateers, especially among heavy dropships and freighters. Eris was served by a single space elevator, and its orbital terminus was busy at all times. Cargo transfers and maintenance craft serviced the heavy haulers queuing to transport their spoils to eager buyers throughout Orionis. Once loaded, the encumbered freighters unlatched from the yard to await the proper rotational window to fire their main engines and begin their long, slow journey.

Navigating a freighter required more precision than flying smaller, nimbler craft because there was no room for error, especially when travelling great distances. Captain Jon Sanderson, a privateer and veteran hauler who owned the freighter
Audrey Pat
, knew this better than most, squeezing every last CRO from the margins by running heavy loads with minimal fuel reserves to maximise space for cargo. The
Audrey
, whose holds were packed with iron and nickel ore, had just reached maximum cruise velocity en route to Tabit Prime when her radar sounded a collision warning with an exceptionally large, unidentified object that was still more than six hundred kilometres away.

In the estimation of the
Audrey
’s navigation systems, it was impossible to avoid an intercept given the Audrey’s present mass, fuel, and available thrust. Captain Sanderson’s demand for answers from Vulcan Harbour Control was pointless; they had no radar coverage this far from Eris, and nothing in their flight log should have been in his path, let alone something so large.

There was enough time to board a life pod and eject. There was also time to jettison cargo, thus shedding mass and giving his beloved
Audrey Pat
manoeuvring options. But Captain Sanderson was a principled man, and refused to relinquish his precious load without
at least understanding what exactly was about to claim it.

His stubbornness, while ultimately fatal, benefitted the Inner Rim. As the distance between them closed, the
Audrey
’s radar was able to resolve the large object into hundreds of smaller returns, each of which happened to be a Ceti warship. To his credit, Captain Sanderson had the presence of mind to broadcast the radar image along with his distress call.

As the
Audrey Pat
was torn apart by Ceti missiles, word quickly spread around Tabit Prime: Vladric Mors was coming, and he was less than a million kilometres from Corinth.

The Navy, meanwhile, was trying to understand how Vladric could have hurled so much space junk at their vaunted Big Eye network, which was now completely obliterated. They correctly determined that his fleet alone – as depicted in Captain Sanderson’s radar image – was incapable of such a feat, unless their numbers had been greatly underestimated.

Mike spoke with startling intensity.

‘Remember your cover,’ he said. ‘You are an OMSPEC operator under my command. Don’t act nervous, don’t speak unless you have to, and stay one pace from my heels at all times. Do you understand?’

‘Yes,’ Wyllym acknowledged.

‘Let’s move.’

Mike opened the airlock hatch, peering in both directions before stepping down onto the tarmac. Stiff from the journey, Wyllym nearly stumbled when he landed. Gathering his armoured legs beneath him, he stood tall like a soldier, only to find Mike glaring coldly at him.