The Princess of Caldris (7 page)

The gunner and the pilot rode the storm, the
gunner spewing expletives, the pilot, still-such control-hunting
the eye of the storm.

I found it in the
quanta-yes-a ship with bad intent. Hammerstein was wrong-finding
the center of the storm would only lead to the worm-hole’s exit.
The assassin’s were at its origin. “Well Hello, Kitty!” Parson’s
hissed as the assassin’s vessel gleamed on his
holo-screen.

“
Who is that kid?”
Annoying- man whispered from his guns, and dead-eye-dick, squeezed
his tracer center mass.

It was a hit, but the other vessel wasn’t
finished yet.

“
Let’s dance!” Parson
rolled the Hammerhead forward and the combat was engaged into a
dog-fight.

Hammerstein’s only thought was, should we
live, they better leave him some evidence.

I pressed my mind again into the spaces of
the dog-fight, hurling with the combatants, searching for a stray
thought, a reveal that would help us define who, and why.

The ships danced in the darkness, but there
was no love between them. Tokushima longed for a gunner’s controls.
Her face was not so lovely then, and the red emergency lights cast
her fearsome and transformed.

I felt the inertial dampers
strain, the G forces begin to pull on myself and then the others.
Parsons rolled the Hammerhead, then splined it erratically so the
enemy couldn’t get a clear bead on him. He watched his fields and
plasma shots ahead of the vessel, set on an encrypted random
pattern of flux so as to avoid enemy targeting
computers.

Then I felt it. A bloodlust
from the other side. They were powering up- “Wormhole! They’re
powering up another wormhole and we’re flying right into it!” I
screamed in a voice too high for a boy my age.

“
Gravity Bombs Parsons!”
Hammerstein barked coolly, “Put one up their hind end right now and
see what happens to their little wormhole”

This time it was
Annoying-Man
whose
instincts where good. His thumbs were all over that button before
Hammerstein even had the sentence out and there came a FOOSH-CLANG!
loud from somewhere in the bottom of the vessel, and I could sense
the wicked tool careening toward its target.

Its onboard computer was
even semi-sentient, rather cruel that-
like
an insect hatched with a very short life and one hideous
objective
. The gravity bomb’s inner
workings were already unlocked in a clockwork nightmare of force
fields. At the microscopic level first. Miniature particle
colliders racing, then a very small black hole, and somehow its
engineers had devised that the systems of the device remain
functioning up to nanoseconds before implosion.

Suddenly the gravity bomb
met the enemy’s wormhole, shot through with an aspect of psychotic
horror. A gruesome sheen and sudden skew, all things in our
universe bent and twisted, ragged and broken. Time and space
scuffled in a nightmare of there, and here, then and now, all
raging in a sickening chaos of
NO!

Parsons rode that psychotic
shockwaves like a mad surfer in a volcanic whirlpool, “Well, Hello
Kitty!” The Hammerhead groaned and the metal fatigue tested its
designers' best intent. Still, the pilot was flush with joy that
the enemy was down and all that he had to contend with was tidal
forces sheering at his stabilizer fields.

Tokushima gave me an
unlikely Edo era geisha smile, like a woodblock print ephemeral
across the ages; “Welcome to the Navy Air, kid. Glad to have you
flying with us.” she said.

She knew the only reason we were still alive
was I kept giving us a small jump on the assassins. I hoped my
prescience held up.

Hammerstein’s mind was already past the
combat, past the whirlpool ride, and into the wreckage of the enemy
vessel. “What have we got?” he boomed.

“
The G-bomb sucked the
front and the bottom of their hull apart just as they fired the
wormhole shot. Looks like you have evidence to scour, Sir,”
Annoying-man said in a too cool tone. He was grandstanding. The
sweat was still drying on his face and his heartbeat returning to
normal.

“
Good. Get a team on it
from Fort Oort. And get us warm and dry, NOW.” Hammerstein eased
back in his seat with a miserable indignation. On the ride home, he
thought, he was bringing a bigger ship. I had Gibbons tapping the
black box

of the Hammerhead the whole while. No one
suspects a kid. I had no intentions of relying only on my
impressions of what was out there-I wanted to examine the ship
camera records later.

IV

Fort Oort

Steve Allman

I was too overwhelmed with
the sheer number of minds reaching for disciplined self control to
realize the formation wasn’t for us, it was just five hundred
airmen waiting for breakfast and their NCOs to give them a hard
time fresh out of bed, just because. It was, however, grand and
dashing in a very powerful way.

Formation. Five hundred
airmen; every chin, every toe, every knee, every hand, every eye
holding themselves just right, steady, steady.

Stepping out of the
Hammerhead I wanted to wave. I could sense their sudden curiosity
like a wave of realization: a kid was climbing out of the
gunship.

The scoured and seared hull
bore witness to how close death had raked its bony fingers across
our beings, and missed. It would be back of course, it always is. I
would dodge it as long as I could. The airmen, unmoving, watched
from their peripheral vision-an acquired skill I realized. I looked
bizarre to them, like a baby Buddha. A baby Buddha wearing an
antique disser.

A wave of ironic familiarity hit me as one
of the officers approached us, “Captain Hammerstein. Welcome back.
Officer Tokushima.”

“
Admiral Kemp.”
Hammerstein didn’t have to salute, since he was now officially
civilian. This pleased him to no end. Long ago and not so far away
(this very hangar in fact) he had once been under Kemp’s command.
Kemp hadn’t been an Admiral then, however.

“
Is this really necessary,
Hammer? I mean,” Kemp looked at me, “No offense kid, but really?
You brought an empath? Really?”

Hammerstein shrugged,
looked at me, “Whattah ya say, Sole?”

“
Well,” I
looked back at Kemp, enjoying where this was going because it
brought Hammerstein a moments respite, “Admiral Kemp you’ve got six
months left to retirement and
you’re just
hoping the CO back in the world doesn't putz it up on you, because
your wife has been coddling your grandson, who should be in
graduate school by now, and you can’t wait to get in his face and
tell him “what for” and how you “seen ten thousand better men doing
hard duty out here on the ice while he finds his silly self
pondering volcanoes and lava flow.” Your CO, Burke Sherwood,
“Analwood” as you and the other officers call
him…”

“
Okay, okay. Oka-y! That
will be enough of that young man, you’re in.” Kemp eyed
Hammerstein. “Good to go. Officer’s quarters. You know the way,
Hammer. Report to Quartermaster and make yourself at home, but
uh-no more of THAT, aye?”

“
Understood, Sir,”
Hammerstein said and looked at me with a smirk. He put his finger
to his lips, “Shh.”

And the Fort was ours, just
like a holo-show. The big toys, the big boys, only, when all that
armor and hardware is sitting out in front of you, for real, it’s
not just cool. It’s deadly, and its true grim purpose and
function-to break things and kill people, well, it's rather
sinister and menacing actually. Your mind wanders to what it would
be like to be on the business end of it all.

Especially since we just
were. Walking to quarters, I could sense a strange respect from the
airmen still waiting in formation for breakfast. They saw the scars
on the hammerhead and knew we had just been in the “doo-doo.” They
had another word in their minds for it, but I am a gentleman, after
all.

Combat veterans, I
realized. I was now a combat veteran. Half the unit was envious.
Most of them hadn’t seen combat yet. I rested my hands on my disser
and gave them a look
. Dead Eye Dick, yeah,
that’s right. We were just in the doo-doo.
Walking by their ranks I basked in the glory.

Coco-butter Parsons stepped
up from behind in a rush, “Come on let’s eat before these chow
hounds get released and the mess hall is swarmed.”

“
Officers lounge, flyboy.
First class on this run. You certainly earned it.”

Annoying-man
chuckled.

“
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
he said.

Tiffany’s?
Ugh, that guy could take the sheen off a
convertible Corvette making a one point landing at a beach bash.
Mr. Gibbons gave me a small tilt of the head. One of our private
signals: "Chuckle-head.”

We moved along toward the
officer’s quarters and I tried to savor the moment. Fort Oort!
Caldera Squadron! Yet a troubling realization had begun to form in
my mind and its implications shot a cast of foul refuse and menace.
Menace over myself, my small cadre of new companions,
and even over the five hundred stalwart airmen
waiting for breakfast
. I remembered then my
impressions of the assassins with the worm-hole device. I hadn't
felt the same organization was behind them. There were distinct and
different culture complexes, syntax, motivations. Thus there was
more than one powerful enemy seeking our destruction, capturing
royal persons, and making acts of war across the worlds. I glanced
up at my Detective friend, Hammerstein, steam rolling across the
astercrete of the hangar floor.

I remembered my fears when
he first approached my family at the Sole estate regarding this
case, that it would be the end of him and many others should he
find the answers he sought.

Foreboding whispered in my
ear, stroking my head with bony fingers
.

The Officer's mess had a
bit more privacy than the main cafeteria but currently it was
populated with pilots still glued to flight reports and having at
their food and beverages with the indifferent stoicism of fueling a
machine. They were trained men-the objective was everything, food
was a tool to sustain their quest. They took no joy in it like the
grunts-it was just something they had to do to continue flying.
Eat, bathe, sleep; simple maintenance work. There was only the
flight that mattered; the high spaces, the void, the patrolling of
the deep Plutonian Oort cloud.

I looked at them and felt
their impressive single-minded absorption in their tasks. No
foolish boys here, but men and women-veterans with decades of duty
on their stripes, care worn soul who could do eighteen hours at a
sitting before they realized they'd done an hour.

Steve Allman

I, however, was still
twelve-and hungry. We took heaping portions of various
foodstuffs-synthetic mostly. Hearty, I realized-but then
Hammerstein's mind was back on task like a deep space run, plowing
through a glacier, shaking loose from a "snowball.” He wanted to
know, "So what did you sense kid?"

"More devils," I said. "But
devils we don't know-meaning another faction. Two distinct echoes
and cultures lie behind the attacks. We're in deep, and
everything-and everyone," I looked about the mess hall, “is in
danger."