A Star Wheeled Sky Read online

  Garsina could tell that her father desperately wanted to invent a reason to say no. But her words had given him pause. She could see him working it all out in his mind. He might have been stubborn, but he was not a fool. He knew what had to be done.

  She took three steps and grabbed up one of his large, shaking hands in both of hers.

  “Please?” she said, squeezing his fingers tightly. “Destiny doesn’t knock at every door. When it knocks at ours, we must answer.”

  His eyes slowly closed, and he brought the skin of her wrist up to his damp face.

  “Promise me you’ll be careful,” he said through a clenched throat. “Don’t take any stupid risks.”

  “I promise,” she said, feeling tears escape from the corner of each eye.

  “May God and your mother forgive me,” he said. “Go. Go! Do us proud, Garsina. Do us all proud.”

  Chapter 4

  Many light-years distant from Planet Oswight, an altogether different test of wills was taking place. Golsubril Vex—kosmarch of Nautilan—was unused to getting so much pushback from her system’s general officers. Ordinarily, the men and women at the top of Starstate Nautilan’s military chain were selected for their obedience, even more than their ability. A willingness to execute orders—without hesitation, without question—was one of the main reasons why Nautilan had been ascendant within the Waywork for as long as Golsubril Vex could remember. It would only be a matter of time before every system in the Waywork was united beneath Nautilan’s blood-red flag.

  But first, there was the matter of the mysterious Waypoint which had appeared near Nautilan’s border with Starstate Constellar. A Waypoint which now lay within Vex’s exclusive reach.

  “We must wait, Madam Kosmarch,” grumbled General Ekk, running his spotted hand over his bald head. “Assemble an overwhelming number of ships. Then proceed unchallenged.”

  “Unchallenged?” Vex said, her eyebrow arching. “For all we know, Starstate Constellar has already moved many ships across the Slipway. Give them too much time to dig in, and Nautilan’s fleet and army may both pay a very high price for such a delay. Perhaps too high a price?”

  “Better than rushing in, Madam Kosmarch,” said General Ticonner, who served as Ekk’s deputy. “For generations, our standing strategy has always paid off. There is no war trickery which can gain Constellar any advantage over us now. One by one, we have pruned away their outer systems. Just as we have pruned away systems from the other Starstates too. We can produce and maintain more ships than they can. We have more people than they do. Even if we waited months—to assemble an expeditionary battle fleet—Constellar’s admirals, in their Deep Space Operations and Defense chain of command, cannot divert sufficient strength to cover this newly discovered Waypoint. Not without leaving themselves fatally vulnerable in other areas.”

  Vex’s marble-and-column audience chamber glowed with the light from a supersized map of the Waywork. Fifty-seven stars, all linked by tendrils of laser light: each representing one of the Slipways over which interstellar travel was achieved. It was a wholly artificial construct—left over from the era of the Waymakers. Who had vanished from this portion of the galaxy half a million years before.

  Until a few hours ago, the structure of the Waywork had been static. And was assumed to always remain thus. Using the alien Keys, humanity could access the Waywork. But no Slipways beyond the confines of the Waywork had ever been created. Nobody knew how to even go about trying. The Keys were as inscrutable as they were indestructible. They permitted access to the Waywork. But not expansion.

  Unless something fundamental had suddenly changed.

  “I agree that our strategy has worked well, so far,” Vex said, using a trackball on her chair’s arm to slowly spin the Waywork in the air—the way a child might spin a star wheel, looking for the different constellations each culture saw in each planet’s sky. “But we’re assuming all conditions will remain constant. Clearly, the appearance of a fifty-seventh Waypoint outside of the Waywork is a sign that we can no longer make such an assumption. And though we in our system do not have the resources to deploy a fleet with truly superior capability, we can at least send a probe force. The results of this probe will tell us whether or not additional military resources have to be applied to the problem.”

  The shoulders of both Ekk and Ticonner sagged.

  I know what they’re thinking, Vex thought to herself. This isn’t the way they’ve been taught to do it according to war doctrine. Ignoring or flouting the rules is a good way to ruin one’s career. Or worse. Oh, gentlemen. You have so little faith. You’ve been bred too well. Trust me to do what I have been bred for, and we shall have victory. With the potential for so much more!

  “Worry not,” Vex soothed, her low, melodic voice echoing around the audience chamber. “I am taking full responsibility for this decision.”

  “Then who shall lead the probe, Madam Kosmarch?” General Ekk asked hesitantly.

  “I will, of course,” she said calmly, a slight smile curling up the corners of her full lips.

  “You?” both generals said in unison, practically stuttering the word.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “It’s just that…well, Madam Kosmarch, you see…we cannot guarantee your safety!”

  Here again, Vex thought. A pedant’s attention to tradition and duty. It’s unheard of for any kosmarch to participate in a military venture, beyond the rechristening of newly conquered and pacified worlds. And if this were a mere frontier system being carved out of the hide of a rival Starstate, I might be content to fulfill an obligatory role. But my senses tell me this time there is a great deal more at stake. Involving the fate of not just this new system on our back doorstep, but Nautilan as a whole. Perhaps even the Waywork in its entirety?

  “My decision is final,” Vex announced, rising from her chair—her kosmarch’s official olive-drab robe swirling slightly.

  The two generals—their own olive-drab uniforms neat and crisp—turned to look at each other, then they looked back to their mistress.

  “I want to leave in less than a day’s time,” she commanded them.

  “We hear, and we obey,” they said, snapping their heels together, then bowing at the waist. When they straightened, they turned as a unit, and marched swiftly out of the audience chamber, letting the chamber’s automatic doors slip quietly shut behind them.

  Golsubril Vex continued to play with the trackball on the arm of her chair, caressing it with carefully manicured fingertips. The Waywork gradually rotated end over end, like a collection of jewels joined with pencil lines of fire. Her eyes kept drifting back to the single new jewel which stuck out of the side of the Waywork—its light throbbing intensely.

  “This might be the fulcrum,” Vex said quietly, to no one but herself. “All my life, I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to change the game.”

  And put the whole of human space under my thumb!

  Chapter 5

  Zuri Mikton tried to be a woman with proper perspective. During a career spanning decades of service to both Constellar and the First Families, she had learned to leaven her enthusiasm for fresh opportunities with a healthy dose of realistic expectation. Timetables were a guideline, not an absolute. Someone or something was always early, as well as always late. You would seldom have everything you wanted, but you could usually get what you needed—with a little creative fudging around the edges. And, most important of all, the requirements of the mission at the outset would never match the requirements of the mission at the conclusion.

  That last axiom had bitten Admiral Mikton in the ass on more than one occasion. Most famously during the DSOD’s rout at the hands of a Nautilan invasion fleet, during the battle for the planet Cartarrus. It had been the one and only time then-Commodore Mikton found herself personally leading the defense, after the destruction of Fleet Admiral Hichel’s flagship. For a full week, Mikton had leveraged less than ten Constellar warships against twenty frontline Nautilan vessels
. For her trouble, Commodore Mikton cost herself more than half her force—along with almost a thousand lives—while inflicting an impressive eight kills. And still she lost the system, eventually retreating through the Waypoint in her damaged prototype battlecruiser.

  Just one more star crossed off the Constellar map. Another piece of free soil annexed during Nautilan’s bloated, monolithic march toward total Waywork domination.

  Too many of the DSOD’s battles had gone like that during Zuri’s lifetime. The giant wall of names attached to the war memorial at Constellar’s capital spoke of numerous friends lost to the never-ending fight. And while Zuri’s remaining peers might have understandingly forgiven her for the defeat at Cartarrus, the Constellar Council’s ever-enduring War Directorate did not.

  Thus Commodore Mikton found herself quietly promoted out of her extant command, and placed in charge of the DSOD forces watching over Planet Oswight, and the Oswight Family holdings in their system.

  It was an auxiliary role, supporting the main effort to hold the line against more Nautilan incursions. Oswight didn’t have a lot of people, but its moons could build ships. Those ships were vital to bolstering Constellar’s combat assets in other systems. Presumably, Nautilan had its eye on Oswight. But there were other, more strategically important targets to be handled first. Thus Admiral Mikton had spent the last five years of her life as a planet-bound administrator. Making sure her Waypoint was effectively ready for an attack that never came. Knowing her days as a tactician—leading potential assaults which might liberate conquered worlds—were over.

  Now?

  The dice were suddenly being rolled again.

  Admiral Mikton would not be present to learn about the strategic shifts DSOD would make, to deal with the unheard of manifestation of a new Waypoint in a new system. She would be on the other side. For better or for worse, this was her chance to once again do something. Put Constellar back on the advance. Take fresh ground. Hold it. Erase her failure at Cartarrus.

  Not that her flimsy expeditionary force to the new system would match up against even half the number of Nautilan ships which had hit Cartarrus. There were new ships being brought online from Oswight’s yards every year, but they lacked both Keys and trained crews. Besides which, every day Admiral Mikton delayed acting was a day Nautilan might use to move people and equipment across their own Slipway to the new star.

  It was a now or never proposition.

  So, Zuri made do with the ships she had to work with, as well as the people attached to those ships. Many of them were gathered before her now. It was a quickly assembled briefing, just prior to departing for orbit.

  The Antagean fellow seemed solid enough. He was a fish out of water in his ill-fitted uniform—one size too large, it turned out—but his eyes were sharp, and he spoke both intelligently and with the experience of a man who had done time traversing the Waywork in the service of his father’s company. She’d have taken him, on account of his authority over his father’s three starliners, even without Antagean’s reserve credentials. That he had DSOD military training was just a bonus. It meant he knew how to follow orders, and could also think within the DSOD’s operational framework. Would he be cool under fire?

  The scion of Family Oswight was younger. But seemed able. She would double as the mission’s Waymaker expert. Lady Garsina did not travel in the resplendent gowns of a tourist. She wore clothing better suited to xenoarcheology, and had a tough-looking majordomo always at her side. The older man’s silver-streaked beard and mustache were trimmed military neat, and he was built like a rocket stack. He had the ceremonial sword of his Lady’s house strapped to one hip, and an outsized sidearm—with use-worn handle—riding on the other. Like his charge, the majordomo’s clothing was suited for austerity, though his shoulders had epaulets bearing the colorful crest of Family Oswight. Other handlers and servants obeyed the majordomo without question.

  Best of all, the entire entourage brought with them Family Oswight’s interstellar yacht. Which would nicely compliment the other civilian ships Admiral Mikton commanded. If the far side of the new Waypoint could be secured, the yacht was small enough to fit into the bays of some of the larger ships in Commodore Iakar’s flotilla. Thus allowing Mikton to begin shuttling Iakar’s assets across the Slipway, one at a time, while auxiliary ships from beyond could be brought in to reinforce the Oswight side.

  A process which would have been much faster and easier, if Mikton had had more Keys to work with. But she didn’t. Ships—and commands—along the frontier with Nautilan took priority. So Mikton would have to do it the hard way. At least until the DSOD could mobilize at the strategic level. If they mobilized. A decision which would only be made once Mikton had returned a proper survey report.

  To that end, Antagean’s starliners were going to be kept busy. Lacking armament, they would be used for two things: making detailed charting runs on the new system’s planets, and carrying DSOD troops and equipment—for an initial outpost—across the Slipway. As with the Family Oswight yacht, the Antagean starliners could eventually be used for piggybacking additional warships to the new system. But first came the chore of figuring out which of the new system’s worlds—if any—would be worth fighting to keep.

  Everyone assembled seemed anxious to get moving.

  Zuri climbed up on an interstellar modular freight crate, and cleared her throat.

  “I’ll make it quick,” Mikton said loudly, so that the scrum of personnel occupying the small spaceport holding bay could hear her. “Once we reach orbit, my flag transfers to the frigate Catapult. All directives for this Task Group will be issued from there. You will take orders from me, or from my deputy, Commodore Urrl. If need be, the Task Group can also look to the Catapult’s captain as acting group leader. Many of you may be unused to taking commands from people in uniform. Try to remember that what we do, we do out of utmost need. You’ve all been previously briefed about the specifics of the Task Group’s mission. I’m here now to tell you that there’s far more to this expedition than simply laying claim to a piece of territory.

  “For as long as any of us can remember, Starstate Constellar has been under threat from its largest neighbor. We’ve tried peace treaties, as well as alliances with the other Starstates, and none of it’s held back Starstate Nautilan’s relentless quest to consume our nation.

  “We—the people in this room—cannot allow Nautilan to advance one light-year farther. There’s no clue, yet, to tell us what we’ll find on the other side of the new Waypoint. We’ll know more when we can rendezvous with the monitor Daffodil, which serves as our vanguard. Suffice it to say that we’re claiming the new system, not just for the Constellar Council, but for the future of liberty in the Waywork as a whole. The freedom of your children, and your children’s children, may depend on what we each do—in these next few days, or weeks, or even months.

  “I therefore call on each of you to do your duty to the last. Not just as employees. Nor merely as paid soldiers of the state. But as patriots. Men and women who know what it means to serve a cause higher than themselves. If you believe you can’t do that—if you can’t look me in the eye and follow me over the Slipway—now is the time to raise your hand, and back out.”

  Every head in the bay swiveled back and forth, waiting.

  There were no takers.

  “Very well then,” Admiral Mikton said. “Get to your clippers. Have a safe launch. And, may God favor the bold and the free!”

  “VICTORY WITH HONOR, HURRAH, HURRAH!” every DSOD member thundered back at her, completing the time-honored Constellar military motto.

  Some of the civilians shouted too, including the Lady Oswight’s majordomo—who hollered loudest of all.

  The scrum immediately broke, with people going this way and that, all rushing to get to their respective concourses. Admiral Mikton’s deputy, along with their small cluster of staff officers, proceeded through the southeastern pressure hatch, which led into a long subterranean tube stretching out und
erneath the spaceport’s kilometers of tarmac. The tube flooring was a moveable beltway, split down the middle by a safety railing, with one half going out to the launch gantries, and the other half going back to the terminals. One by one, each of the staff stepped on and were whisked away, serenaded by the sound of humming machinery.

  Outside of her small security valise, Admiral Mikton carried nothing. She’d previously packed all of her duffels, and sent them ahead to be stowed with the bulk cargo. It had been a long time since she’d been to space. As the motorized beltway carried her closer and closer to the clipper which would take her into orbit, Zuri felt a small thrill of excitement.

  “Quite a thing to be witnessing fulfillment of the Word,” said the officer standing on the beltway directly behind the admiral.

  Zuri turned and looked at the short man, who wore a DSOD uniform similar to her own, but with the frocking of a priest draped around his neck. Chaplain Ortteo wasn’t considered mission-essential for this expedition, but DSOD policy said flag officers conducting field operations had to carry at least one. So Ortteo was it.

  In truth, Zuri didn’t have much use for men of the cloth. She’d been a skeptic of organized faith most of her adult life, and didn’t believe in the literal truth of the Word—though the Word was invoked numerous times in both Constellar law and DSOD doctrine. As to the specific part of the Word which Chaplain Ortteo was citing, Zuri could not guess.

  “You’ll forgive me if I am not up on scripture,” she said.

  “Eighteenth Prophecy,” Chaplain Ortteo said with a smile. “The fifth passage reads, ‘When men have dwelled long enough in darkness, God shall open a doorway through the loneliest wall of heaven.’ Later in the same Prophecy, the thirteenth passage says, ‘Going forward on ships of fire, the wicked and the righteous will each claim dominion over hallowed soil. And the bones of the dead shall rise and speak, passing judgment.’ There’s a lot more in the Eighteenth, but you get the idea.”