A Question of Faith: A Castle Federation Novella Read online

  A Question of Faith

  A Castle Federation Novella

  Glynn Stewart

  A Question of Faith © 2020 Glynn Stewart

  Illustration © 2020 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

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

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  1

  Aballava System, Castle Federation

  June 5, 2706 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

  Fleet Admiral Darius Moonblood was old. He could feel it in his bones most days, even in his nanomatrix-laced left leg and his completely artificial right leg. Almost a hundred and twenty years old, even twenty-eighth century medicine could only do so much and he was well past due to retire.

  Today, though, that argument hadn’t won yet and he stood on the observation deck of the Castle Federation Space Navy’s battle station Aballava Defense Seventeen and watched the latest addition to his command slowly decelerate into her parking orbit above the gas giant.

  The star system he stood in was one of the quieter systems available in the seventeen-system Castle Federation. Aballava was a daughter colony of Castle, a mere half-billion or so people. There was no way this system could have supported the fleet resting in orbit of the gas giant Llandudno.

  Vagabond was the newest arrival, the ship he was here to see, but she brought his Counter-Clockward Fleet up to six Alcubierre-Stetson drive battleships. Each battleship represented a full twentieth of the gross system product of a moderately well-off system.

  Which meant that his fleet had a price tag equal to roughly half of the annual income of the entire star system.

  “Admiral Moonblood,” a polite voice interrupted his thoughts. “Captain Michaud sends her regards and invites you to join her for dinner aboard Vagabond this evening if that fits with your schedule.”

  Moonblood quirked his lips in a slight smile.

  “And would you, Commander Itzel Barre, have let Vagabond arrive without having made sure I was available to dine with her Captain?” he asked.

  Senior Fleet Commander Itzel Barre was his operations officer, a tall and dark-skinned woman who took careful responsibility for everything her Admiral got up to.

  Once he’d convinced her not to babysit him, she’d become very useful. He was old, not broken.

  “Of course not,” Barre confirmed cheerfully. “I’ve been in communication with Captain Michaud’s XO for the last week, since they left Castle.”

  Quantum-entanglement communications and the immense q-com switchboards in major capitals had brought the galaxy closer together. If only that had resulted in the peace and commonality so many had expected.

  He sighed. His neural implant was advising him that he’d just received a briefing update from the Senate, probably the geopolitical update he’d been waiting for.

  “Arrange a shuttle, Commander,” he told Barre. “Assuming you haven’t already. We will join Captain Michaud for dinner.”

  “Of course, Admiral. Anything special I should arrange for?”

  “I want to see a demonstration of her lances,” Darius admitted. “But since they’re still so classified I believe we’re trying to pretend the stars themselves don’t know the beams exist, that isn’t happening.”

  He shook his head with that same small smile.

  “No, Commander Barre. I believe we will be fine with whatever Captain Michaud puts together.”

  Vagabond looked almost stubby in comparison to the rest of Darius’s ships. An immense, rough arrowhead, she was thicker at both the front and the back than the Crown-class battleships that filled out his fleet; she was also a hundred meters shorter.

  There were reasons for that. Both ship classes had spinal mass drivers running the full length of the ship. The kilometer-long Crown had three of them as the battleship’s main guns, using mass and gravity manipulation to fling a hundred-kilogram projectile across space at a third of the speed of light.

  Vagabond had a single mass driver that managed the same velocity by dint of being sixty percent larger than any of a Crown’s guns, but it was entirely a secondary weapon compared to her real weapons.

  The positron lances weren’t overly noticeable from the outside of the ship, the weaponry mostly concealed beneath the smooth layers of her neutronium-laced armor, but they were far more dangerous. A mass driver used the age-old method of flinging a high-speed chunk of metal into somebody.

  The newly developed positron lances took the antimatter output of a zero-point-energy cell, normally used for fuel for engines or reactors…and focused it into a coherent beam of positrons with a range of easily hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

  The guns might be “merely” rated as two hundred kilotons per second versus the hundred-plus megatons of the kinetic impact of the mass driver rounds…but Darius was grimly aware of all of the ways the lightspeed weapon was superior.

  He wanted a fleet of Vagabonds. Instead, he had one. Starships were far too expensive to be produced in vast quantities. If the handful of Vagabond-class ships being built proved their worth, the fleet would be refitted. But even that would take time…time the old man wasn’t convinced his nation would get.

  “She’s pretty, at least,” Barre said beside him.

  “Just pretty, Commander?” he asked.

  “I’d probably stab a friend in the back to command her,” she said with a chuckle. “I mean, not a really good friend…but an okayish one? Stars know, Admiral…antimatter guns?”

  “Someone was far too clever when they came up with that,” he agreed, his implant keeping a careful mental eye on the shuttle as it swooped around to the battleship’s shuttle bay. “I hope it’s enough for what’s coming.”

  Barre snorted.

  “Last intel suggests that the Imperium hasn’t even realized we’ve experimented with positron lances, let alone that they’re working on them.”

  “Look at the reports from Condor,” Darius said quietly. “The Commonwealth tested something similar to our positron lances against the defenses there. I don’t think anyone was supposed to see it, but one of our agents got the data out.”

  “Condor was a pirate base. The Commonwealth did everyone a favor clearing it out,” Barre replied.

  “They had reason to be there, yes,” he agreed. “But there always seems to be a reason for the Commonwealth to invade, doesn’t there? And each system they annex brings them closer to us and the systems we’ve promised to protect.”

  “The Senate won’t pick a fight with the Terran Commonwealth,” his right hand woman told him. “Would they?”

  Darius grimaced.

  “Every one of our trade treaties for the last two centuries has included a promise that the Castle Federation would defend our partners in the face of attack,” he noted. “Most of the multisystem powers do that—it helps encourage
everyone to keep the peace, and it’s an easy giveaway that gets us better terms and we never expect to have to honor beyond fighting pirates.”

  He ran a hand over his right thigh, the sensors in the plastic and metal not quite responding the same way as if he touched his left leg. He’d lost it in a fight against excessively clever pirates a long time before.

  Even ten years later, his particular reaction to regen had been identified and they might have been able to regrow his leg…but nobody was going to remove a perfectly functional prosthesis for might.

  His companion was quiet. She’d known him long enough to know that if he was drawing his own attention to the prosthetic, he was being melancholy.

  “We won’t pick a fight with the Commonwealth, but I’m not sure nearly as many people pick fights with Terra as their propaganda would have us believe.”

  “But sir…it’s the Terran Commonwealth,” she replied. “Not the bogeyman.”

  Darius chuckled as their shuttle slid aboard Vagabond, automated shutters sliding closed behind them.

  “I may be an old war horse jumping at shadows,” he admitted, “but the Commonwealth not being a bogeyman, Commander Barre, is starting to feel like an opinion contrary to the facts.”

  He rose with the ease of decades of practice as the shuttle slowed to a halt.

  “Come on. Let’s see what Captain Michaud has prepared to feed us.”

  2

  Violetta Michaud was almost as tall as Darius himself with platinum-blonde hair to his pure white. She also put on an amazing table and Darius was impressed with the food as her stewards delivered and cleared away plates in rapid succession.

  When the last dessert plates were cleared, wine was poured and the stewards retreated. Only the four senior officers remained, and Michaud hesitated for a moment before nudging her XO.

  “The Senate, the Navy, the Castle,” he reeled off in practiced tones after realizing that, Senior Fleet Commander or not, he was the most junior officer left at the table. “I give you the Federation!”

  “The Federation!” the other three officers replied, and Darius sipped his wine.

  It was as good as the rest of the meal, and he studied Michaud and her XO carefully as they sipped their own wine. Senior Fleet Commander Easton Adema was a broad-shouldered man, probably only young to eyes like Darius’s. He kept his focus on the wine—but Michaud returned his gaze calmly.

  “I have a verbal briefing from Joint Command,” she finally told him. “Including the note from Fleet Admiral Carson to me that you are, in fact, senior to every officer in the Joint Command.”

  “And some day, they’ll haul me off a flag deck and give me a desk job like that,” Darius replied with a chuckle. “Until then, I stand on our most threatened frontier. What does Bob have to say?”

  He used Fleet Admiral Robert Carson’s nickname with an intentional edge. Michaud took it in stride—but Adema had to swallow quickly to keep his wine under control.

  “The Chief of Naval Operations,” Michaud replied calmly, “wanted to let you know that we believe the Imperial detachment at Mossflower has been reinforced. Admiral von Santiago is believed to be up to eight battleships now.”

  “That should have been in my formal briefing,” Darius pointed out. “Which says she has six battleships.”

  “Carson didn’t tell me why this was going verbally,” the Captain admitted. “Only that it wasn’t reliable data that he wanted you to have anyway. ‘To keep his eyes on the prize,’ I believe were his words.”

  “He wants me watching Coraline, not Terra,” Darius agreed. “He knows I’m not as readily distracted as some think, but he worries.” The old Admiral shrugged and grinned. “He doesn’t need to,” he told the other three officers. “I can watch two ways at once.”

  “If von Santiago has been reinforced to eight ships, that leaves us outnumbered and outgunned if she moves, doesn’t it?” Adema asked.

  “Not with Vagabond,” Darius replied. “If the positron lances work as advertised, she has no idea what she’d be walking into. However, she wouldn’t move, anyway. Aballava and Caerleon have significant fixed defenses. Von Santiago would want at least twelve battleships before she’d move against either—or absolute certainty that she knew where we were and that we didn’t know she’d deployed.”

  “It’s a shell game,” Barre added. She knew the strategy. “We have three systems at risk on this front: Aballava, Caerleon and Celliwig. All three are daughter colonies from Castle—we’re on the Counter-Clockward frontier of the Federation and we’re too damn close to the Imperium.

  “But Aballava and Caerleon are both fortified sufficiently to stand off half a dozen battleships on their own. Caerleon is ten light-years from Celliwig, five from Aballava. Aballava is six from Celliwig, which means that we’re three days from either here, but it’s five days between Caerleon and Celliwig.”

  “So, we sit in the middle with the assumption that we likely deploy to Celliwig,” Michaud concluded.

  “Exactly,” Darius agreed. “We’re only six days’ travel from Castle, so its not like we’re isolated out here. But luring us away from the defenses and jumping on us with half again our tonnage is von Santiago’s dream.

  “It’s about the only way the Imperium is going to open up our Counter-Clockward flank short of picking up their entire fleet and coming right at us,” he concluded. “They’ve got fifty-eight battleships to our fifty-four. I’ll take those odds, given that I know we’ve got two Vagabond-class ships and have reequipped the fleet with antimatter-warhead missiles.”

  “That was the other thing Carson wanted me to warn you about,” Michaud said after a moment to process. “Like the reinforcements at Mossflower, it’s not certain yet…but he thinks there’s weight to the reports that the Imperium is deploying their own antimatter missiles.”

  Darius leaned back in his chair with a long exhalation.

  “What I’m hearing, Captain, is that our CNO is having a pissing match with JD-Int and making his own decisions about what is and isn’t valid intelligence,” he noted.

  “I can’t speak to the Joint Department of Intelligence, sir,” Michaud said carefully. “Or to Admiral Carson’s relationship with them. Only the messages I was asked to pass along.”

  “I know,” he conceded with a throwaway gesture. “The Federation has only fought pirates for a long time, Captain. We’re not exactly the most efficient of military machines. Shit like this happens.” He grimaced. “It’s why I don’t have Carson’s job. He can handle Senatorial politics. I can’t.”

  It wasn’t even that Robert Carson played the political game and Darius didn’t—nobody became a Fleet Admiral in a peacetime navy without playing politics. Carson just enjoyed it more than Darius did—and Darius trusted the other man to have Castle’s best interests at heart.

  Which left the navy with an energetic politician in charge at home and a capable old war horse on the critical frontier. They both figured it was a win for everyone.

  “Anything else my old friend decided to hand me, Captain?” Darius asked.

  “Just those two bits, sir,” she noted. “I’d prefer not to get caught up in Admiralty politics, sir.”

  “Don’t count on that for long,” he warned her. “And I doubt you managed command of our newest and shiniest battleship by not playing politics, either.”

  Darius grinned at the moment of displeasure that crossed Michaud’s face. He’d got her in one. She played disinterested in politics, but she wouldn’t have her command without getting involved.

  That meant she was one of Carson’s protégés. Darius could do worse.

  “Dinner has been a pleasure, Captain, but I need to get back aboard Seventeen,” he told her. “I’m old and I need my sleep. Experience says the q-com will have delivered a small legion of snakes into my inbox by morning.

  “I’ll let you know which ones I’m sharing with you once I’ve seen them.”

  “Of course, Admiral. I appreciate you taking the t
ime to join us,” Michaud replied.

  “There are just over twenty-five thousand officers and crew aboard the battleships of my fleet, Captain,” he pointed out. “I can’t know them all, but it is my business to know as many of them as I can—and my Captains, Captain Michaud, are the hands through which I control enough firepower to devastate worlds.

  “I must know those hands. So, here we are.”

  He was halfway through turning to leave when the Priority-Alpha-One alert hit his implant like an angry lightning bolt.

  3

  Getting a secured pod aboard Vagabond to link into the q-com network was easy enough. Captain Michaud’s office was only a few steps from the woman’s dining room, and she readily placed it at his disposal.

  That, Darius had expected. He hadn’t expected to find himself facing an equal number of Senators and Admirals when he answered the call. The three uniformed officers represented the core of the Castle Federation’s High Command—and including him, the call now held eighty percent of the Fleet Admirals in the entire Federation.

  The three Senators, equal members of the Federation’s thirteen-person executive, were linked in from a different location. All three Admirals were in one place and all three Senators were in one other place…and even managing to get those six people into two rooms was an achievement.

  Darius’s intended demand of Robert Carson died unspoken on his lips as he absorbed the situation, falling back on clipped recognition of everyone.

  “Carson, Laurent, Bhattacharya,” he greeted the three Admirals. He knew all of them. The Senators were less known to him, but his neural implant connected the faces to the histories and memories he did have of the three women.