Ashen Stars Read online

  Ashen Stars

  Glynn Stewart

  Ashen Stars © 2018 Glynn Stewart

  Illustration © 2018 Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Other Books by Glynn Stewart

  Chapter One

  Captain Isaac Gallant finished reviewing the readiness report in front of him with a sigh. It was the last of the departmental reports for the Confederacy Space Fleet’s warp cruiser Scorpion, and it matched the pattern of the rest of them.

  Isaac studied the terminal screen in his office for several more seconds, then made a decision with a shake of his head.

  “Commander Giannovi, please report to my ready room,” he ordered over the intercom. A moment later, an indicator on the computer screen tattooed into his left arm changed, informing him that Lieutenant Commander Harris now held the conn.

  Giannovi stepped into his ready room—exactly three steps outside the bridge, just far enough that you had to pass through the bridge’s security detail to reach it—seconds later.

  “You asked for me, sir?” she asked crisply. Lauretta Giannovi was a throwback by the standards of twenty-fourth-century humanity, born in Italy of entirely Italian extraction. She was a permanently tanned-looking woman of barely average height with short-cropped black hair.

  “Have a seat, Commander,” Isaac ordered. He shared Giannovi’s unimpressive height, which meant that sitting allowed her to tower over him—and that wasn’t how this meeting needed to go.

  “I presume you reviewed the departmental readiness reports,” he told her. It was part of the executive officer’s job, after all.

  “I did,” she confirmed, still crisp and efficient as ever.

  Isaac concealed a sigh.

  “Are you aware of the Liebermann Readiness Summation Metrics?” he asked bluntly.

  “They’re part of every XO’s training, sir,” Giannovi said carefully. Some of her calm seemed to slip. “They’re…far from perfect.”

  “Like any summation tool,” Isaac agreed. Given that the late Franz Liebermann had been his father, he was perhaps more familiar than most with Liebermann’s own assessment of the tool’s flaws.

  “But it serves a useful purpose for Captains to assess the changes in their command and compare their departments,” he noted. “For example, when I came aboard Scorpion a month ago, the readiness reports from every department but one were in the mid-eighties, more than acceptable. Review of the detailed reports is required, but it told me that I needed to focus on our warp drive department.”

  Giannovi nodded slowly.

  “We got Lieutenant Commander Catalan’s people a refresher course on the warp drive and set up a new cross-training program,” she remembered aloud. “It wasn’t really a surprise—there are only eight ships in the CSF with independent FTL.”

  “Agreed,” Isaac said with a wave of his hand. The Captain was even darker-skinned than his XO. The Captain’s father had spent his adult life aboard ships, but Franz Liebermann had been born on New Soweto. The colony wasn’t much less ethnically mixed than the rest of the Confederacy at this point, but its populace did tend towards the coloration of its original African settlers.

  “So, imagine my concern when I reviewed the second set of semi-monthly departmental readiness reports and the summation matrices put them all, including Catalan’s warp drive people, in the mid-seventies,” he noted dryly.

  “That was two weeks ago, Commander. Since all of those reports had been signed off on by my executive officer before they reached me, I expected the problem to be temporary, the normal problems of assuming a new command and that if anything critical had arisen, my XO would bring it to my attention.”

  Giannovi was silent. Her gaze was fixed on a point behind Isaac, roughly fifty centimeters to the left and above his head.

  “So, then I receive today’s reports,” Isaac said dryly. “Lieutenant Commander Catalan’s department has reached eighty percent. I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to engage this ship’s space warp drives. The rest of her departments, however…”

  He could tell from her fixed department that Giannovi had performed the same analysis, or something similar.

  “The Liebermann Metric generally regards an eighty percent average as a truly combat-ready vessel,” he noted. “Departments in the seventies general require closer evaluation of their reports and touching base with the officers to see where they need assistance.

  “Departments in the sixties or below are potentially serious problems,” he concluded. “Warp drive remains at eighty-two. Most of our departments, however, are now in the high sixties—except gunnery, which has managed to degrade to fifty-seven.”

  Isaac steepled his hands and looked his XO directly in the eye.

  “Review of the actual reports, however, told me that the reason Lieutenant Commander Harris’s report was so low was because Mr. Harris was actually honest in his report,” he said flatly. “Review of the underlying statistics in the other department reports suggest that everyone except warp drive should actually be five to ten points lower.

  “But none of my officers appear to think that, for example, a full-minute increase in scramble time for the emergency repair droids, was a point of concern. None, Commander Giannovi.

  “Including my executive officer, who signed off on all of these reports before they reached me.”

  He smiled.

  “Would you care to explain your reasoning, Commander?”

  Giannovi swallowed and finally met his gaze.

  “Permission to be frank, sir?”

  “Granted.”

  “Your mother is the First Admiral,” his XO reminded him. “The—if we’re being frank—unquestioned military dictator of the Confederacy.”

  Isaac winced but nodded. Fifteen years ago, then-Seventh Admiral Adrienne Gallant had overthrown a corrupt president and taken “temporary” control of the Confederacy government.

  Roughly half a million dead in two attempted revolutions later, it was very clear that “temporary” was no such thing. Even the woman’s son couldn’t argue with the description.

  “Your career to date has been, in every sense, safe,” Giannovi told him. “I’ll grant that your exemplary Academy scores were when the First Admiral was merely an Admiral, but your every promotion since has been exactly in the middle of the zone. You made Captain at exactly the average age, and the only thing out of the ordinary was that you were immediately given command of a cruiser instead of commanding one of the destroyers first.

  “At no point in your career since First Admiral Gallant took control of the Confederacy has any ship you have served on been placed in significant danger,” she concluded. “While I doubt your mother has given any instructions to that effect at all, the Fleet has generally taken the attitude that letting the dictator’s son get killed qualifies as a really bad idea.”

  That, sadly, had been roughly what Isaac had expected.

  “What you are saying, Commander, is that you and the department heads see no reason to push the crew to one hundred percent of their capacity because you see no chance of this vessel being called into combat?” he asked.

  She shrugged.

  “The likelihood that the Confederacy Space Fleet will risk First Admiral Gallant’s only child in any material action is basically zero,” she admitted. “While I will admit that professional pride will keep t
his ship in some semblance of fighting form, there is no point to making her the premier ship in Battle Group Dante.”

  Isaac smiled thinly and looked at the display on his wall. Battle Group Dante orbited the planet of Horizon in the Epsilon Eridani System. Dante herself was at the core of the group, the four-hundred-meter-long wedge of the battlecruiser over twice the size of his own Scorpion.

  “That may be true, Commander,” he told her. “But you are also wrong. We will not be keeping this ship in ‘some semblance of fighting form.’ We will bring this ship back up to full combat readiness and keep her prepared to do her duty.”

  “Sir, I—”

  “Commander Lauretta Giannovi,” Isaac snapped. “This is a capital ship of the Confederacy Space Navy. Equally important, may I remind you, is that while Battle Group Dante has fifteen ships, Scorpion is the only vessel in the battlecruiser group with independent FTL.

  “Every other ship in this formation must use the Eridani Wormhole Station to leave this system. The tactical and strategic value of the Space Fleet’s warp cruisers cannot be overstated.”

  From Giannovi’s expression, she wanted to argue that point. Scorpion’s grav-warp ring could propel the cruiser at four times the speed of light. Compared to a wormhole station that could transport an entire battle group up to two hundred light years, it was barely a strategic factor at all.

  “I will not preside over the reduction of one of only eight grav-warp-equipped vessels in the Fleet to a glorified sinecure. Am I clear, Commander?”

  She hesitated.

  “Regardless of what the Fleet may expect me to do, I swore an oath to do my duty,” Isaac reminded her quietly. “I will not be forsworn. That means this ship will be ready for action. Whatever it takes.”

  Slowly, Giannovi nodded.

  “Convincing the departmental heads of your determination will not be easy,” she admitted. “Convincing the crew will be nearly impossible without doing something dramatic.”

  “Fortunately, I’d been thinking along just those lines,” Isaac told her. “And I think we need to take the ship out for some full-scale live-fire exercises, including of the warp engines.”

  His XO winced.

  “Given our current readiness…”

  “Those exercises will hurt,” he agreed evenly. “And I think that is exactly the reminder Scorpion’s crew needs!”

  “You want to do what?”

  Vice Admiral Hiro Adams was a relatively standard representative of twenty-fourth-century humanity. He had a faded-parchment tone to his skin, notably folded dark green eyes and pitch-black hair buzzed short like every other officer of the Confederacy Space Fleet.

  “I want to take Scorpion out on a series of live-fire exercises at the New Liverpool Belt,” Isaac repeated. “Her readiness has slid badly since I came aboard, and I need to shake some heads to make people realize that she didn’t just become the personal yacht of the First Admiral’s son.”

  His bluntness surprised a chuckle from Battle Group Dante’s commander.

  “I’ll admit, your crew might not be the only person needing that shake,” Adams admitted wryly. “All right, Captain Gallant, what did you have in mind?”

  “I want to do a series of navigational maneuvers heading out to the belt via the Eridani Wormhole Station,” Isaac told him. “Then I’ll need to carry out some live-fire exercises in the belt, then head into some of the denser clusters for combined live-fire and maneuvering exercises.”

  Adams nodded thoughtfully.

  “If your readiness is as bad as you suggest, the last could be actively dangerous,” he pointed out.

  “The crew is solid,” Isaac replied. “The officers have been letting things slide for a few weeks, but that’s not enough to really undermine the competence of my people. The nav and live-fire exercises en route should shake off most of the rust. And, well, frankly, if my crew is rusty enough that we actually let an asteroid hit us, Scorpion can take the hit…and I’d rather get smacked by a low-vee rock than some idiot pirate’s missile.”

  “And then I’m guessing you’re planning on warping back?”

  “Exactly, sir,” Isaac confirmed. The New Liverpool belt was an eighteen-hour direct flight from Horizon for a warship. With the exercises he was planning, he would double that—but a return under warp drive would take just over a minute.

  “We can probably have the crew at Eridani Station throw out some navigation buoys and targets for you as well,” Adams said thoughtfully. “I’ll speak to Captain Ventra.

  “You have permission to carry out your exercises, Captain. I’d appreciate if you could present a plan in advance so we can warn our sensor crews when to expect pulse-gun fire, but I think shaking those heads that expected you to coast on your mother’s name is a good plan.”

  Unmentioned was that one of those heads had been Admiral Adams’s, but Isaac nodded his understanding of the Admiral’s full meaning.

  “Assistance from Eridani Station would be perfect,” he admitted. “Dancing around in the belt won’t give us the opportunity for true high-speed maneuvers and firing passes; those take too much acceleration time. But if we have targets and nav buoys at the wormhole station, that opens up new opportunities.”

  “I’ll make sure Ventra reaches out to you,” Adams promised. “It’s not like missing one ship will matter if something goes wrong—and if something does go wrong, you can be back here faster than anyone else!”

  “Agreed, sir. We’ll keep our ear to system and Confederacy com networks, just in case,” Isaac promised.

  Adams waved a dismissive hand.

  “You do that,” he agreed. “But remember to have fun too, Captain. It’s not every day we sign off on one of our captains blowing up a bunch of asteroids!”

  Chapter Two

  Isaac Gallant felt the pulse of his bridge as Scorpion’s engines flared, flinging the ship across space toward her destination.

  Most of his officers seemed as much confused as anything else, he noted. Scorpion’s crew really did seem to think they’d won the jackpot by having the First Admiral’s son as their Captain—and now they were being subjected to the kind of intensive training regimen generally reserved for flagships, wartime, and particularly martinet Captains.

  He was perfectly willing to let his crew decide if Scorpion under him was the first or last of the three options. One way or another, he intended to maintain a warship, not a daycare with guns.

  Scorpion was well away from Horizon now, accelerating toward the Eridani Wormhole Station. Despite the mediocre readiness reports, her crew had handled getting her underway in a single day with complete aplomb.

  The warp cruiser was an oddity in the Confederacy Space Fleet. Roughly the same mass as the missile cruisers that kept company with battlecruisers, she was only two hundred meters from bow to stern—barely longer than the destroyers that made up the majority of the Fleet’s hulls.

  Unlike any other vessels in the Fleet, however, there was a two-hundred-meter-diameter ring mounted two-thirds of the way along her hull. That ring was mostly containment fields and capacitors to hold and energize the one-centimeter-thick ring of exotic matter that made up the core of her warp drive.

  Heavily armored as it was, the warp ring was critically fragile compared to any other part of any other warship in the Fleet. But it also allowed Scorpion to outpace light on her own, which meant that the warp cruisers were the Confederacy’s fast attack ships.

  All eight of them.

  For the cost of a warp cruiser, you could get a missile cruiser and a destroyer. For the cost of two of them, you could build a battlecruiser. The full flight of the Tarantula-class ships had cost as much as the Confederacy’s single dreadnought.

  Given their price and their unique tactical value, Isaac refused to see his ship sidelined. His crew was just going to have to get used to that.

  “Message incoming from EWS for you, sir.”

  “I’ll take it here,” Isaac responded. “Engaging the privac
y shield.”

  While the privacy shield wasn’t entirely obvious, every officer on duty on the bridge would have received a notice to their tattoo-comps when he engaged it. The announcement was required by regs, however, and given that the shield meant he couldn’t hear his bridge crew either, he agreed with regs.

  They were still far enough away from EWS to make carrying on a conversation difficult, so Captain Ventra had sent a recording.

  The white-haired station commander was lucky that Isaac had taken the call in private. The open smirk he wore wasn’t exactly respectful to anyone.

  “Captain Gallant,” he greeted Isaac cheerfully. “I see you decided to kick your layabouts into actually doing their jobs.”

  Ventra was very lucky the call was private, Isaac reflected.

  “We’ve set up a series of navigational exercise for Scorpion to run as she approaches,” Ventra continued. “It starts off easy but then ramps up. I checked them with a simulated ‘perfect ship,’ and your cruiser is at least theoretically capable of the last few, but your helm officer will need to have nerves of steel.”

  Isaac smiled. Aisha Renaud was certainly competent, but he wasn’t sure she had “nerves of steel.” If she could acquire them, though, it would be an asset to Scorpion and, not incidentally, to her long-term career.

  “It’s harder for me to make the gunnery exercises quite so complicated,” Ventra complained. “I don’t have much in terms of active drones I can spare, so mostly you’ve just got crates and barrels with beacons attached. The beacons will flicker in a timed sequence to simulate ECM and maneuvers; your gunners will need to hit them while they’re active for it to count.

  “I have to thank you for the chance to pull this together,” the other Captain told him. “It’s been all kinds of fun and I look forward to watching your crew punch through it. There’s a download packet—”