The Terran Gambit (Episode #1: The Pax Humana Saga) (31 page)

No, not the biggest lie. The biggest bluff. The most dangerous gambit. And it was to win. He was convinced, absolutely without a doubt convinced that if he hadn’t done what he did, they would all be dead. Every last one of them. He knew Ben. Since the man had joined the Viper crew at Eglin, he knew that the man was not capable of command—of being able to take the risks and make the necessary difficult calls.

But that knowledge didn’t make the weight of the lie any lighter.

“Hey. You ok?” Po rested a hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah, Grizzly.”

She stepped forward to stand next to him, watching the surgery on the young ensign. The vital signs on the monitors over his head held steady, but looked terribly weak. “What’s with the Grizzly? I thought I was Mama?”

Jake chuckled. “I thought you didn’t like that callsign.”

“It suits me, I guess.” She reached a hand up to a stray, graying curl that had fallen out of the tight grandmotherly bun on the back of her head and encouraged it back into place.

“Yeah. The crew really looks up to you. Well, the bridge crew, at least. Back there, in the heat of things, when you were calm, they were calm. When you seemed agitated, they looked at you and became agitated. I saw it in their eyes. You were like the cool, steady hand.” He looked over at her, breaking contact with the closed eyes of the ensign. “I’m glad you were there. We couldn’t have pulled it off without you.”

“Give yourself some credit, Jake. You were incredible up there. When Ben signaled our surrender, I thought we were lost. I’d given up hope. But then you blustered your way in there and took charge. I guess Captain Watson saw the real Jake and not the incredibly foolish, daredevil jackass Jake.” She turned to face him. “I’m glad he changed his mind.”

She knew. How could she not know? She was toying with him, he was sure. Making him feel guilty about his charade in the hopes he’d throw his hands up and surrender, giving Ben the command he should rightfully have. The way she was looking at him—the gleam in her eye, the slight squint. Was that squint just old age creeping up on her? No, no. Of course she knew. She had to. She seemed to know everything people were thinking.

“Po,” Jake began, trying to find words, any words to redirect the conversation. “I need you as my XO.”

“Me? What about Ben? Jake, I think you need me more at tactical than at—”

“No, I’ve decided I want Ben as head of ship security, and will man tactical otherwise. But you—I need you with me in command. The crew responds to you. Will you?”

“Yeah, they like me now. Just wait and see if they like me as their XO barking orders at them,” she said, her squint and glimmer and faint smile all deepening.

He smiled and grabbed her hand. “Thanks.”

Jake watched Doc Nichols wipe his sweaty brow with his sleeve, apparently forgetting to ask the nurse to dab it for him, and glance up at the window. He said something to the nurse, who stepped into his place as he went to clean up at the wash basin.

“So, Commander Po, what the hell are we going to do? We’ve got a badly damaged ship, half the Imperial fleet on our tail, a supposedly genius Admiral out for blood, and the rest of the Resistance basically wiped out. I’d say not bad for a day’s work, you know?” He tried humor, but it fell flat. It was too early, the consequences of his decisions still staring him, literally, in the face through the glass wall of the operating room.

“The Imperials will be looking for us, that much is sure. We can’t just pop into any old Imperial star system, or even most of the ones on its periphery without getting shot at,” said Po.

Jake grunted his agreement. “We’re going to need supplies. And food. We’re good on water as long as we have power, but we’re going to need a source of anti-matter. And we need a place to drop those Imperial soldiers—we can’t just have them traipsing about the ship for months on end. Ben doesn’t trust Tomaga anyway. Says he’s going to double-cross us. Kill us in our sleep or something.”

“He’s right to be concerned, Jake. If Tomaga had half a brain as a soldier he’d know that waiting to fight another day, possibly in a much more advantageous position, was a far better strategy than just dying there in the forward section today.”

Jake’s eyes followed Doc Nichols as the man stripped off his surgical gear and recorded some notes on a data pad at his desk.

“You know what we should do? We should track down Admiral Pritchard. We’d be less vulnerable travelling around together as backup for each other. And technically he’s probably the highest ranking Resistance Space Fleet officer in existence right now. Admiral Bates died on the
Firebird
.”

Po regarded him skeptically. “You even think he’s alive? Everything I’ve heard says the November Clan got him out in the Watora sector. Blasted the
Fury
out of orbit.”

Jake shrugged. “It’s as good a place to start as any. The Novembers aren’t exactly friends with the Empire.”

“Nor friends with us. They’re pirates, Jake. Criminals, pure and simple.”

“Yeah, but the enemy of my enemy is …” he paused, trying to find the right word.

“Our friend? You’ve got to be joking Jake,”

“Actually, I was going to say our temporary ally. I don’t intend on becoming friends with the pirates and thugs of the nether regions of the galaxy. But, if they can help us defeat the Empire, well, there’s that,” said Jake.

Po pursed her lips, considering his words, before she apparently remembered something else she was going to ask him. “And Ensign Smith? The one who fired that quantum field torpedo and started the whole mess? Did you have time to look him up in the computer?”

“No. Haven’t had time.”

“Well I did. Turns out he’s from Corsica. I dug around and saw that his family lives in an impoverished neighborhood at the outskirts of one of the bigger cities. He joined the Imperial fleet just a few years ago.”

“So he was an Imperial plant, then?”

Po nodded. “I’m sure of it. I searched some recent records, and his family has moved to a swanky apartment on New Kyoto. Seems their bank account has swelled recently. I think Trajan promised the kid that he’d take care of his family if he did what he did.”

The door to the operating room slid open and Doc Nichols plodded out, puffing on his ever-present cigar. At least he didn’t bring it out during surgery.

“Well, I’ve got good news, and bad news.”

“What’s the good news, Doc?” Jake stroked the five o’clock shadow forming on his chin.

“Ensign Chen is going to make it. Barely,” the doctor said, closing his eyes with another pull on the cigar.

Jake waved the smoky haze in front of his face. He’d never liked cigarette or cigar smoke. It reminded him too much of his father.

“And the bad news?”

“The bad news is that I can’t say the same for over a hundred of his fellow crew members. One hundred and sixteen bodies have passed through these doors today, Captain,” he said, waving the cigar at the door to sickbay, “we’re using the quarters across the hall as a temporary morgue. My question to you is, Captain, how many more bodies can I expect over the upcoming weeks?”

Jake pressed his lips together, not trusting his temperament to give a diplomatic reply. Nichols seemed to notice his frustration and continued.

“Look, Captain. The hard decisions have to be made. That’s why Dick chose you, I suppose,” he said, looking Jake squarely in the eye. He thought for a moment that his secret was about to be revealed to Po.

But Nichols continued. “But hard decisions or no, they have consequences that affect this crew, and affect my work. You did a fine job getting us out of this embarrassment of a situation that the Resistance High Council got us into, but don’t think I’m going to come kissing your ass for it. People died today because of you, hero or no.”

Po interrupted, speaking with a quiet intensity that surprised Jake. “No, Doctor. People didn’t die because of Jake. They died because of the Empire.” Her eyes flashed with the barest hint of anger, though the flash was more a smoldering burn, piercing Doc Nichols’s lined, tired face. “The empire took my husband, they took my children, they took my freedom, and now they’ve nearly taken my ship and dearest friends. This man saved us today, and don’t you forget it.”

She spun on her heel and marched out of sickbay without another word, pausing only to briefly touch the shoulder of one of the harried nurses rushing around to the moaning injured.

“Well, Doc. Let that be a lesson to you. Don’t cross the Captain in front of the XO. Especially not that XO.” He felt like smiling but couldn’t bring himself to with the bloodied men and women laying on tables and against walls all around him, many staring at their new, young Captain.

“Yeah, wipe that smug look off your face, Captain. You and I both know what happened, and I stand by my choice. Just try to be a hero next time without losing half the ship in the process. If I wanted that, I could have chosen Commander Jemez.” He puffed a ring of smoke into Jake’s face before turning away to tend to another wounded man that two marines carried through the sickbay doors.

He peeked into the temporary morgue and stared at the stacks of bodies. They seemed asleep, no more. Just asleep. But the blue faces and hands told the grim reality. Jake was nearly ready to summon Ben to sickbay and pin the captain’s bars on his collar. That would make at least one of them happy.

“Friend!” a voice called out to him. He focused on the man being carried into the crowded room and finally recognized him through the caked-on blood in his hair and face.

“Alessandro! You’re injured! Did this just happen?” He ran over to the man and helped lift him onto an examination table.

“No, of course not! I was injured during the first few minutes of combat. They found Commander Xi, you know.” His voice grew more subdued. “He’s still down there—we laid his body in a storage room.”

“One hundred seventeen,” Doc Nichols said, glancing up at Jake with a dark look.

“But friend! You should know, I’ve figured something out about those new engines. I thought I knew them inside and out at CERN where we developed them. Where we came up with the Milan approximation. But opening them up and realigning the field under bombardment from Imperial warships, well, Jake, you can imagine what invigorating effect that has on this gray matter up here,” he poked his blood-encrusted forehead.

“All in good time, buddy. Let’s get you some treatment and rest, and then I’ll come down to your quarters and you can tell me all about it on that chalkboard of yours. Over a game of chess, of course.”

He patted the man’s shoulder and started to walk away, before looking back at him. “Why did you say we?”

“We?”

“You know,
we
came up with the Milan approximation? So you knew the guy that came up with it?”

Alessandro hesitated. Jake had not seen Alessandro hesitate before. He didn’t know that the man knew how to hesitate. “Well, Jake, after a fashion. You see—”

“Bernoulli, where are you from?”

“Italy. You know this.”

“But where? Where in Italy?”

Alessandro shrugged. “Milan.”

Jake finally put the pieces together. How the man seemed to know so much about the engines. The Milan approximation—why hadn’t the inventor just used his own name?

He began walking away again. “Uh huh. Get some rest, Bernoulli.”

* * *

Captain Titus waited outside the door of the ready room, trying to build up the gumption to enter. Music drifted through the slit between the double doors—music he didn’t immediately recognize, but that wasn’t what kept him waiting. The thing holding him back was the memory of the chief engineer, and the two young technicians who’d been assigned to help the man.

He wasn’t sure why he was thinking of them—there’d been a hundred other deaths that day from the collision with the
Phoenix
and the subsequent blasts from being caught in its gravitic wake. There was nothing particularly special about those three versus the rest of them. And yet still he couldn’t shake the image of the man staring out at him with cold, dead eyes immersed in the pool of blood spreading onto the deck.

“Captain, if you’re going to come in, come in,” the Admiral’s voice called from the room. Titus gulped. He approached the door, which opened of its own accord.

“Do you have your final damage report, Captain?” Trajan was seated, his one eye was closed, and it wasn’t until that moment that Titus realized that it wasn’t just his eye that was missing, it was his eyelid. Somehow that made it worse. On one side, that face looked almost peaceful with its eye closed, contemplating the music sounding from the speakers. But the other half looked like the face of a dead man, especially now with the gash across his cheek and forehead that Trajan for some reason had not seen fit to bandage.

“I do, sir, but shouldn’t you go to sickbay? Your face looks like it is causing you pain.”

The eye stayed closed, and Titus thought he saw the barest hint of a smile, but on closer inspection, the Admiral’s face maintained its contemplative aura. “I feel no such thing, Captain. All I feel is resolve. The damage report?”

Titus approached with the data pad and set it on the desk next to the Admiral. “I have it here sir.”

“What’s the summary?”

“One hundred and two dead, fifty-six missing—”

“The ship, Captain, tell me about the ship,” Trajan said with impatience.

“Crews are still repairing the breaches in the hull—they were too much for the hull-patch drones. Anti-matter engines are fully repaired, though the gravitic drive will take another week at least. Weapons systems are normal, except for the forward railgun turrets and ion beam cannon. Oh, and the collision destroyed half our assortment of nuclear warheads.” Titus watched as Admiral Trajan absorbed the news, his eye slowly opening to stare at him.

“Excellent. Wonderful job, Captain. Please extend my personal thanks to the repair crews.” He closed his eye again. “The music. Do you like it?”

Titus listened to the power chords sounding out in rapid succession, oddly interspersed with what sounded like a banjo. An odd combination, but somehow it worked, even if the music was not to his tastes. “Interesting, sir.”