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  Mach exited the motel and waited a second for his vision to adapt to the change of light. His prosthetic eye scanned the ship and delivered to him the recorded specifications from its public serial ID number.

  Of course! A CW ship.

  This one was a Phalanx-E—the E standing for executive. It measured twenty meters from bow to stern and five point five at its widest part: the two stub wings that flowed toward the stern with a slight bow curve.

  It looked brand new to Mach, with its black curved windshield and spotless matte silver hull and wings. A tail fin rose ten meters into the air, the base of which held the two swollen pill-shape fusion motors. It was as dull to look at as it was to pilot. He’d used them before when he was an officer and had to escort CW dignitaries around various systems. It was barely faster than the broken ship 94-12 had sold.

  With a depressed sigh, Mach walked over to the right side of the hull, knowing this was the ship Morgan had said he could use. The damnable ship didn’t even have a laser turret, let alone disruption emitters.

  As he approached, the square door hissed and lowered to the ground, creating a ramp, at the top of which stood two young CW cadets, still wearing their blue training uniforms. Each one had a single white stripe attached to their left shoulder: junior pilots, otherwise known as JPs. They were the first step of the CW Defense Force ladder. This meant neither of them would have even been outside of the Salus Sphere. Their only flight-combat experience, if they even had that, would have come from the simulators at Fides Prime’s training center.

  Mach shook his head in disbelief. How could Morgan have sent him two greenhorns and a glorified taxi and expect him to hunt down the biggest, baddest ship in the known universe. You wouldn’t give a hunter a blunt spoon to take down a Salusian saberdog.

  The two JPs gave him a perfect salute and stepped down the ramp, their motions perfectly in sync. Mach just watched them approach, still in somewhat of a fog of disbelief.

  He pondered that he could take the ship and leave the newbs behind. He’d get a decent amount of cash for a perfect condition Phalanx-E and could put that toward a decent-but-used warship that might actually have some luck at surviving the pirates in the outer rim, let alone take on the Atlantis ship.

  On the exchange boards, he’d seen a fairly nice vestan Battle Budgie, named after the Axis Combine’s strategy of sending one into a battle zone to see if it died or not. They were small, tough craft that could take a beating. When put together in a squad, they could cause havoc to larger ships.

  The best thing about the Budgies was their LightDrives. They could fly almost as fast as a CW destroyer, clocking in an impressive sixty-five HPL. And that was done on a modest fuel load, meaning one could get around the Salus Sphere and beyond without too much fear of a pirate interception.

  “Sir, did you hear us?” the boy said, dragging Mach away from his thoughts.

  “Yes, JP, I heard you. What’re your names?”

  “I’m Danick, and this is Lassea, my sister.”

  “It’s an honor to work with you, sir,” Lassea said, bowing slightly.

  Mach hid his distaste for this formal bullshit and tried to remember that he too once was a greenhorn. “At ease, you two, this is no CW mission. I won’t need any of that formal stuff. Call me captain or Mach, your choice, it doesn’t matter to me. Now listen, the first thing we need to do is get this taxi off this grass. It belongs to one of the biggest crime families in the sector and wasn’t designed for landing ships on.”

  Danick blushed and fidgeted.

  Mach realized they were twins. They both stood at about five and a half feet tall and wore their dark brown hair closely cropped as per CWDF regulation. Neither featured what one would call an athletic physique. To Mach they looked malnourished with sunken cheeks and barely an ounce of fat on their bodies.

  They both stared at him with blue eyes, waiting for further instructions.

  “To get the ship off the grass, one has to actually fly the thing. You two are JPs, right?”

  “Yes, sir, Mach, I mean Captain,” the girl said, turning on her heel and striding up the ramp. Her brother, Danick, followed. Mach shook his head and entered the craft, wondering why on the all the sins he had ever committed he had been lumbered with this pair.

  Once inside the ship, Mach entered the bridge and took the central captain’s chair. The two twins sat either side of him at a pair of navigation consoles, their hands poised over the holographic haptic displays.

  Mach breathed in the smell of new ship. It still had that stringent smell about it of drying glue and welded polymers. His seat was upholstered in the softest of Bora leather. He sank into its cushions and felt himself relax for a moment.

  The sparse light-gray design of the CW shipbuilders brought it all back to him: his days in the force, rising up the ranks until he became an officer of his cruiser. If he hadn’t fucked things up, he would have been navigating his own destroyer by now. But then who needed a destroyer when one was going to get the Atlantis ship.

  “Okay, kids, let’s get on with this, shall we? We’ll get to know each other on the two-day journey.”

  Lassea turned to face him. “What is our destination, Captain?”

  Mach grinned as he delivered the coordinates.

  Both Lassea and Danick balked, speaking at the same time. “What? The prison planet via the Vekron Valley? But, Captain, that’s certain death through there. The horans are supplying the freedom fighters.”

  “Indeed, my young charges. Is there a problem with that?”

  Danick added, “The AI won’t let us plot a course that close to the NCZ.”

  “He’s right, Captain,” Lassea added. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Is it now? Tell me, do you two also let your mother wipe your ass?”

  The twins opened their mouths and closed them, reminding him of those yellow piper fish. “This is our ship, and now, despite my reservations, you are my crew—for now—so let me show you how to fly this waste of metal. Someone pass me a laser blaster.”

  Danick reached under the console and brought out a plastic box with a yellow caution sticker on the front. He entered a code and opened the box, retrieving the laser blaster. He handed it to Mach, thankfully not barrel-first.

  “You keep guns in safety cases now?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Protocol, Captain,” Lassea said.

  “Peacetime… goddamned peacetime has turned everyone into a bunch of scared pups.”

  Mach took the gun and approached Danick’s console. He rested a hand on the boy’s bony shoulder. “Is this the AI-Nav?”

  The boy nodded.

  Mach shot it twice. Smoke billowed from the black box, sending sirens and lights wailing in the bridge.

  “Turn all that crap off,” he shouted to Lassea. The girl frantically looked for the override codes. Mach just sat back and waited.

  Eventually, she found the correct button and brought the ship back to an oasis of calm. “Right, Danick, tell me, how old are you two?”

  “Nineteen, Captain.”

  “Well, let’s see if you two can see twenty. Enter the coordinates for the Vekron Valley.”

  “We don’t have any outboard weapons, Captain,” Lassea said, her face becoming pinched with fear and panic.

  “Well, I guess we’ll have to improvise, won’t we? Now hit that launch button and let’s get going. I’ve got a crew to get and the quicker we get to Summanus, the quicker we can go after the Atlantis ship.”

  “Um…” Danick said, his hand hovering over the manual flight controls.

  “What is it?” Mach said.

  “We don’t have credentials to enter Summanus space.”

  “That thing I said about improvisation? That extends to breaking into a prison. Now launch this bird. That’s an order, boy.”

  Mach grinned as Danick touched a trembling hand to the manual launch controls and set the coordinates for the Vekron Valley. One way or another, these JPs would find ou
t if they were good enough to be on Carson Mach’s crew.

  Chapter Six

  With Carson Mach agreeing to take the Atlantis ship assignment, Morgan knew he had the Commonwealth’s best man on the job, not that he’d admit it to Mach’s face. The Atlantis ship’s weapons could wipe the smile away in a heartbeat.

  Successful completion would achieve Morgan’s dream of captaining the flagship, returning to active service and shedding the boredom of his ceremonial position. Some people dreamed of being an admiral, for him it took away his purpose. With the Axis massing on the edge of their empire, the CW didn’t have enough combat-experienced officers on active duty.

  In order to assist Mach’s mission, Morgan decided to visit the man that most people on Salus Prime considered a fruitcake. Theo Beringer worked in the Fidesian Remembrance Center, a museum dedicated to the history of the twelve planets in the Fides solar system. Beringer was obsessed with the Atlantis ship.

  Morgan regularly visited his old technical officer below the two-hundred-meter-high, blue-tinted glass pyramid, in the ancient catacombs now used to store historical information. Beringer spent nearly every working hour in his office. He was the man to visit for any human requiring a deeper cultural understanding of the fidesians, but more importantly, had a useful network of colleagues throughout the sphere.

  A virtual reality figure of a fidesian in traditional dress, tall and thin with green-tinged skin and wispy hair, wearing a multicolored woven robe, appeared on a sheet of glass when he entered the complex. “Welcome to the Remembrance Center. Would you like to take the official tour?”

  “No, thanks. I’m here to see Theo. I’ll show myself to his office.”

  The figure steepled her fingers and bowed her head. “Have a pleasant day.”

  So far Morgan’s day had been far from pleasant. He spent most of it drafting personal letters to the families of the Orbital Forty victims. Some thought it an unfashionable thing to do, but he thought the old tradition carried more meaning than an electronic message.

  A group of thirty human, fidesian and fidian children in their matching yellow uniforms moved around the eroded statues of mythical creatures and tall glass display cabinets containing excavated artifacts, tapping notes into their smart-screens. Morgan headed for the underground display of cave paintings and basic tools, created thousands of years ago during the fidesians’ version of the Stone Age.

  Fidesians took their culture seriously and this place was as much a temple as a museum. Morgan stood on the electronic ramp and cruised down the catacombs at a gentle speed while a neutrally accented female voice talked through an overhead speaker in Salus Common, the hybrid language used by the fidesians and humans, which was thankfully dominated by English. She was explaining the evolution of the species from cave-dwelling hunters to sophisticated artists and explorers.

  The tour led left at the bottom of the ramp, along a clean brightly lit tunnel. Morgan headed right, past the vaults containing the non-displayed items and shelves of historical documents. Beringer’s office was at the end of the smooth stone corridor. He loved being close to the detail, he always did, and predicted a lot of the horan moves accurately during the Century War.

  Morgan raised his hand to the authentication pad outside Beringer’s door. Before his palm connected with the black glass plate, the door slid open with a pneumatic hiss.

  Beringer relaxed back in his antique brown leather chair and smoothed the sides of his wiry gray hair. Light brown scrolls were piled on the left-hand side of his desk. A monitor and touch pad sat on the right-hand side. Three slabs of stone, with ancient symbols chipped into their sides, leaned against the back wall of his brightly lit office.

  “Admiral Morgan, what can I do for you today?” Beringer said and peered at him with his light green eyes. He’d instructed the medical support unit to create him a new pair of fidian eyes after losing his sight due to age-related macular degeneration. Morgan still couldn’t get used to them. He’d engineered himself to be a hybrid, but the fidesians and fidians loved him for it.

  “The Atlantis ship’s back. I’ve been tasked with destroying or capturing it.”

  Beringer’s eyes widened. He bolted forward, tapped on the touch pad and swung his monitor to face Morgan. “The myth becomes reality. One of my team found this in a cave on the other side of the planet. Take a look at this.”

  Morgan squinted at the image of a carving on a wall of rock, brightened by artificial light. He recognized the shape of the Atlantis ship instantly. Boltan, the fidesian god of destruction, stood next to it and held a sphere.

  “How old is that?” Morgan said.

  “At least four thousand years. I’ve collected every single known occurrence and still can’t work out a pattern. It might help if I had access to the horan records.”

  “I’m sure you know a man who can get them,” Morgan said. He sat on the plastic chair in front of Beringer. “That’s the reason I’m here. I need your help.”

  “Why come to me? You’re an admiral with powerful resources at your fingertips.”

  Morgan sighed. “You’d think so, but it doesn’t work like that. I’m no more than a desk jockey nowadays, but finding the ship can get me back into active service. I’m putting a specialist team together, but it’s top secret.”

  “What kind of top secret?” Beringer said, raising an eyebrow, creasing the wrinkled skin on his forehead. “The type that Kenwright doesn’t know about?”

  “You know me too well. I’ve recruited Carson Mach and tasked him with putting together a crew.”

  “Mach?” Beringer laughed and continued to tap his spindly fingers against the smart-screen. “I can see why you need to keep this under wraps. I’m surprised he hasn’t drunk himself to death.”

  “He’ll survive longer than all of us. I want you to join him. If he finds the ship, we need to get our hands on the tech and harness it.”

  Beringer stopped typing and looked up. “I gave that kind of work up years ago. The only man I know who can do it and would join the crew is Kingsley Babcock.”

  Morgan shook his head. “You can’t be serious? I can take the heat for a secret mission using Mach. Babcock would kill any chance I have of returning to the fight.”

  “It was twenty years ago. Most people have forgotten about it.”

  “The marshal won’t forget the hundred thousand casualties after he hacked into the vestan artefact.”

  “He didn’t know about the virus,” Beringer said. “Marshal Kenwright should remember who programmed the AI-driven advanced combat systems that tipped the war in our favor.”

  “People always remember the screwups. I can pay him well and the fleet won’t know a thing.” Morgan sat back and thought for a moment. Babcock was the finest technical mind in the CW. He escaped into exile after unleashing the virus while trying to gain a better understanding of vestan technology. If Mach captured the Atlantis ship, Babcock would be the best man for the job. “The problem is locating him. He could be anywhere in the Salus Sphere.”

  Beringer bowed his head. “I’m still in touch with him. He keeps his finger on the CW pulse and we share information on the Atlantis ship. If anyone can track it or predict a behavior model, it’s Kingsley.”

  The revelation came as no surprise. Morgan knew Beringer and Babcock were tight during their time in the fleet. Kindred spirits with insatiable curiosities and a shared obsession about the Atlantis ship. Neither of them ever accepted the myth.

  “Can you contact him and get his agreement?”

  “Only if you promise he doesn’t end up in a Summanun cell.”

  “You have my word on it,” Morgan said. “Please do it as soon as you can. I’ll communicate with Mach when you give me Babcock’s coordinates.”

  Beringer smiled. “I’ve already messaged him.”

  Morgan’s screen flashed. He glanced down at the display. “I’ve got to go. I’ll trust you to explain the situation.”

  Morgan stood and left the office, p
leased that he had a team in place that was capable of finding and hacking the Atlantis ship. If they could survive an initial meeting.

  ***

  Morgan left the Remembrance Center and climbed into a transport pod. Operations had messaged him, requesting his presence in the center. Horan destroyers were on the move. “Command center, please.”

  The pod whined through the apartment blocks at the western end of the base. Morgan gazed at the sun reflecting off the shimmering glass structures. They replaced the older traditional-style housing that the humans first built on arrival in the Salus Sphere.

  Confident that he’d put together the best combination to track and hack the Atlantis ship, it now meant he could focus on the horan threat. They would already know about the Orbital Forty and be carefully monitoring CW movements.

  The pod stopped him outside the command center block. Morgan returned inside and took the elevator to the eighth floor. As usual, they would report events to him and communicate strategy, and expect him to play nodding dog. But he’d already decided to start taking a more proactive role.

  Organizing the secret mission had reinvigorated him and stiffened his resolve to get back amongst the action. If the horans were planning an attack, the CW needed combat-experienced officers to lead the fight.

  Morgan approached the central operations desk. “Update me on the movements.”

  A young fidian lieutenant pointed to a large screen on the left, monitoring the noncombat zone around the sphere and a small area of the Axis territory beyond. “A group of five horan destroyers have gathered on their frontier, a light-year from Retsina.”

  “We think they’re trying to take advantage of the wormhole attack.”

  Morgan gazed at the screens. It didn’t make sense that the horans would use such an unsophisticated plan to probe with five destroyers. They would realize that a heavily armed CW ship would be heading for the area to bolster the frontier.