Persepolis Rising

Chapter Eight: Singh

Singh was dreaming of wandering, lost in the halls of a vast spaceship, when the comm on his desk buzzed him awake.

“Yes?” he croaked even before he’d opened his eyes. There was nothing wrong with his taking a nap in his quarters. He wasn’t shirking any of his duties. And the shakedown of his ship, the Gathering Storm, had meant working for sixteen and sometimes eighteen hours a day for weeks now. He couldn’t continue as an effective leader and officer if he didn’t take every opportunity to grab a little shut-eye.

And yet, something inside him didn’t want his crew to know. As if having the same biological requirements as other humans was admitting weakness.

“Sir, we are nearing rendezvous with the Heart of the Tempest,” came the reply. Lieutenant Trina Pilau, his navigation officer. “You asked me to—”

“Yes, yes, quite right. I’m on my way,” Santiago said as he rolled out of his couch and waved on the lights.

His quarters were also his office, and the red folder containing his orders from the admiralty was still sitting on his desk. He’d been reviewing them for the fiftieth time or so when he’d fallen asleep. Leaving them out was a breach of operational security, and one he’d have reprimanded a junior officer for. As he returned them to his safe, he told the ship to make a note of the lapse in his private log. At least it would be part of the permanent record, and his superiors could decide later if it required further inquiry. He hoped they wouldn’t.

He took a moment to wash his face in his private lavatory. The cold, biting water was one of the perks of his station. He put on a fresh uniform. A captain set the standard for his officers. Appearing on duty clean and pressed was the minimum level of professionalism he expected from them, and so he was responsible for it in himself. When he was presentable, he opened the door that separated his private space from the bridge of the ship.

“Captain on the bridge!” the chief of the watch snapped. The officers who were not actively manning stations stood and saluted. Even the consoles, polished to a spotless shine, seemed to radiate respect, if not for him as a man then at least for his authority. The blue of the wall matched the flag, and the sigil of his command—three interlocking triangles—had been built into the surface. It made him feel a deep, almost atavistic pride seeing it. His ship. His command. His duty.

“Is Colonel Tanaka here?” Singh asked.

“The colonel is in her briefing room with her senior officers, sir.”

A twitch of annoyance troubled him, as much with himself as with his chief of security. He’d meant to have a quiet conversation with her before meeting with Admiral Trejo. He’d heard unofficially that Tanaka and Trejo had known each other before, and he’d intended to get her assessment of the man. But it was too late for that now.

“The con is yours,” said Davenport, his executive officer.

“I have the con,” Captain Singh said, and sat in his chair.

“The Tempest has cut thrust and is awaiting our arrival,” his flight control officer said, pulling up the range map on the main screen. “At current deceleration we’ll make final docking approach in twenty-three minutes.”

“Understood,” Singh replied. “Comm, please send Admiral Trejo my compliments and request permission to dock with Heart of the Tempest.”

“Aye, sir.”

“I’d love to get a good look at her,” said Davenport.

“All right, let’s take a peek,” Singh agreed with a nod.

The truth was, he was just as curious. Of course they’d all been briefed on the configuration of the Magnetar-class battle cruisers, of which Tempest was the first. The old Proteus class had been retired, and this new generation was only now being deployed. He’d seen dozens of concept sketches and photographs of the ships under construction, heard rumors of the new technologies that they would support. This would be his first chance to see one of Laconia’s most powerful battleships flying free and in her element. “Sensors, let’s take a close-up look, shall we?”

“Aye, sir,” said the officer at sensor control, and the main screen shifted from the docking map to a telescopic view of the approaching ship.

Someone let out a quiet gasp. Even Davenport, an officer with nearly a decade in the fleet, took an unconscious half step back.

“Good God, she’s a big one,” he said.

The Heart of the Tempest was one of only three Magnetar-class ships to come out of Laconia’s orbital construction platform. The Eye of the Typhoon was assigned to the home fleet and the protection of Laconia itself. The Voice of the Whirlwind was still being grown between the spars and limbs of the alien orbital arrays. And while the fleet now consisted of over a hundred ships, the Magnetars were the largest and most powerful by far. The Gathering Storm, his own ship, was one of the Pulsar-class fast destroyers, and he was fairly certain the Tempest could fit a dozen of them inside its hull.

The Pulsar-class destroyers were tall and sleek in design. To Singh’s eye they were almost reminiscent of old Earth naval ships. But the Heart of the Tempest was massive and squat. Shaped like a lone vertebra from some long-dead giant the size of a planet. It was as pale as bone too, even where the curves fell into shadow.

Like all ships built by Laconia’s orbiting construction platforms, it had the sense of something not quite human. The sensor arrays and point-defense cannons and rail guns and missile tubes were all there, but hidden under a self-healing plate system that made the surface of the ship seem more like skin than not. Grown, but not biological. There was something fractal about its geometry. Like crystals showing the constraints of their molecular architecture in the unfolding of shapes at higher levels.

Singh wasn’t an expert in the protomolecule or the technologies that it spawned, but there was something eerie in the idea that they’d built things partly designed by a species that had been gone for millennia. Collaboration with the dead left questions that could never be answered. Why did the construction array make the choices it made? Why place the drive here instead of there, why make the internal systems symmetric and the exterior of the ship slightly off? Was it a more efficient design? More aesthetically pleasing to its long-vanished masters? He had no way of being certain, and probably never would.

“Tempest acknowledges,” the comm officer said.

“Remote piloting for dock now,” his helm added, and the main screen shifted from telescopic shots of the battleship to a wire frame course ending at the Tempest.

“Very well,” Singh said with a smile. The admiralty had entrusted him with one of Laconia’s state-of-the-art ships, and they’d filled it with serious and focused officers and crew. As a first command, he couldn’t have asked for better.

That he and his ship were the tip of the imperial spear was just icing on the cake.

“Admiral Trejo sends his compliments,” the comm officer said. “He asks that you join him for dinner in his private mess.”

Singh turned to his XO. “Stay on the Storm and keep the crew alert. We have no idea what reception we’re getting on the other side of the gate, and may need to deploy at a moment’s notice.”

“Aye, Captain.”

“Rig for docking. I’ll be in the bow-crew airlock. Mister Davenport, you have the con.”

The Tempest’s operations officer, Admiral Trejo’s third in command, was waiting for him on the other side of the airlock. Technically they were the same naval rank, but as a ship’s captain, tradition dictated that Singh be treated as the superior officer. She saluted and granted him permission to board.

“The admiral would have greeted you personally,” she said as she led him out of the airlock and they floated down a short corridor to a lift. The walls in the Tempest looked like sheets of frosted glass, and glowed with a gentle blue light. Very different from the bulkheads of the Gathering Storm. “But this close to the gate he doesn’t like to leave the bridge.”

“Fisher, right? I think you were a year behind me at the academy.”

“I was,” she replied with a nod. “Engineering track. Everyone said logistics was the faster path to command, but I just love working with exotic tech.”

She stopped and tapped on the wall panel to call a lift. While they waited, the bulkheads began to pulse from blue to yellow.

“Grab a handhold,” Fisher said, pointing to one close by. “Drive is about to come online.”

A moment later they both drifted to the deck, and Singh felt his weight grow until it was about half a g.

“Not in a hurry,” Singh said, and the elevator made a gentle beep and the doors opened.

“The admiral’s a cautious man.”

“Speaks well of him,” he said as they began to rise.

Admiral Trejo was a short, stocky man, with bright-green eyes and thinning black hair. He came from the Mariner Valley region of Mars, but the traces of his accent were almost imperceptible. He was also the most decorated officer in Laconia’s military, with a career that stretched back to pirate hunting for the Martian Navy even before the gates opened. They studied his tactics in the academy, and Singh thought the term military genius was justifiably applied to his career.

He’d expected the private mess of an admiral and fleet commander to be larger, more luxurious than the one he claimed on the Gathering Storm. It turned out to be a table that pulled down from one bulkhead in Admiral Trejo’s slightly larger office/living quarters. The aesthetics were different only because the ship itself was.

“Sonny!” Trejo said, waiting to return his salute and then grabbing his hand and shaking it vigorously. “Finally all the pieces are in place. It’s an exciting time. Would you like to sit, or do you want the tour?”

“Admiral,” Singh replied. “If there’s a tour to be had, I’d be honored to see a little more of the ship.”

“She’s a sight, isn’t she? Call me Anton, please. No need for formality in private, and we’ll be working very closely together in the coming months. I want you to feel like you have complete freedom to speak your mind. An officer who won’t share his opinion and insight is of no use to me.”

It was an echo of the high consul allowing him to use his military title, the permission of a little familiarity in private to build a sense of approachability and rapport. Now that he’d seen it twice, he understood it would be expected of him as well.

“Thank you, sir. Anton. I appreciate that.”

“Come on along, then. It’s too large to take in all at once, but we can hit the highlights.” Admiral Trejo led the way down a short corridor to a lift that stood wider than the one on the Gathering Storm, with rounder edges that left Singh thinking of the mouth of some deep-sea fish. “I’ve been re-familiarizing myself with your career to date.”

“I’m afraid that, like most of the officers trained after the transition to Laconia, I have very little in the way of operational experience.”

The admiral waved this away. The lift door opened, and they stepped in. The anti-spalling padding on the walls was gently scalloped, like the presentiment of scales.

“Top of your class in logistics. That’s exactly what this posting will need. Me? I’m an old combat commander. Spreadsheets give me hives.”

The lift descended with a hushing sound like a million tiny bearings spinning at once, or the hiss of a sunbird. The small hairs on the back of Singh’s neck rose a little. There was something uncanny about the Tempest. Like he’d entered into a vast animal and was waiting to see its teeth.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “My orders were quite specific on—”

The admiral waved him off again. “Forget your orders for a moment. Plenty of time to get to that later. For now, I want to get to know you a little better. You have a family?”

Another point. Duarte had touched on his home life as well. Another piece of the secret teachings of Laconian command. He’d read that a command structure took its tone from those at the top. He’d never seen it so clearly in practice before. He wondered whether he’d been meant to. If this was a conscious lesson passed from Duarte to Trejo to him. He had the sense that it was.

“Yes, sir. My spouse is a nanotech scientist with the lab in Laconia City. She specializes in genetics. We have one child. Elsa.”

“Elsa. Unusual name. Very pretty.”

“My grandmother’s. Nat—Natalia, my spouse, insisted.”

The lift stopped. The doors opened on a wide and flowing deck. There were no stairs, but a gentle undulation in the deck raised some workstations above others. It seemed almost random until he saw the captain’s station that could command direct line of sight to all the flight-deck crew at once. The design was elegant and utterly unfamiliar at the same time.

The XO caught sight of them and stood at attention, surrendering command, but Trejo waved him back. The admiral was present, but not to take command.

“Connection to the past is important,” Trejo said as they walked across the gently sloping deck. “Continuity. We honor those who came before, and hope that those we bring into the world do the same for us.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anton, please.”

“Anton,” Singh agreed, but knew calling the admiral by his first name would never feel natural or correct. “We almost never call her Elsa.”

“So what, if not Elsa?” the admiral asked.

“Monster. We call her Monster.”

The admiral chuckled. “Named for another grandparent?”

“No,” Singh said, then stopped. He worried that he might be oversharing, but the admiral was staring at him, waiting for the rest of the answer. “We were not really ready when Nat got pregnant. She was just finishing her postdoc, and I was doing two- and three-month patrol tours as the XO on the Cleo.”

“No one is ever ready,” the admiral said. “But you don’t know that until after it’s happened.”

“Yes. So when Elsa was born, I’d just rotated back to an administrative position, and Nat had moved to a more permanent research job, and we were both learning the ropes while a very insistent one-month-old made her demands.”

Trejo led the way down a curving ramp at the side of the room. Hatches irised open as they approached them and closed again once they’d passed. The light came from thumb-sized recesses in the wall, perfectly regular in their spacing, but rounded and soft. Organic life subjected to military engineering.

“So,” Singh continued as they walked, “we were exhausted. And one morning, at about three when Elsa started crying, Nat rolled over to me and said, ‘That monster is going to kill me.’ And that was it. She was Monster from then on.”

“But you say it with a smile now, yes?”

“Yes,” Singh agreed, thinking of his daughter’s face. “Yes, we do. And that’s why I’m here.”

“Why you’re here, hm? You don’t seem like the type of man who’d choose to go without his family.”

“It will hurt to leave them behind for this deployment. It will be months, at least, before they can join me on Medina Station. Possibly years. But if I can give my daughter the version of humanity that the high consul has planned, it will all be worth it. A galactic society of peace and prosperity and cooperation is the best legacy I can imagine for her.”

“A true believer,” the admiral said, and Singh felt a flush of shame that perhaps he appeared naïve to the man. But when Trejo continued, there was nothing mocking in his tone. “This will only work because of the true believers.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. And then, “Anton.”

The admiral led the way into a broad corridor, larger than anything he’d ever seen designed in a ship. The Tempest didn’t have the closeness of other ships, the design constrained by the need to cut back every kilogram, to waste no space at all. It was a ship that claimed power by the shape of its walls. Singh felt a little awe at it. As he supposed he was meant to.

Two midshipmen sat at a table, laughing and flirting until they saw Trejo. The old man scowled, and the pair saluted and scurried off to their duties. Singh realized that no one had spoken to them in the time since they’d left the admiral’s cabin. The tour might seem casual, but it was intended to be private as well.

In the same tone of voice one might use to ask what the time was, the admiral said, “Explain to me the tactical and logistical problems with controlling Medina.”

Singh stood a little straighter. Comfortable discussions of family were over. Now it was time to work. He pushed his sleeve back a bit to pull the monitor off his wrist, and flattened it onto the abandoned table. He pulled up the briefing. He’d been preparing it for weeks, and the sudden, irrational fear that he’d overlooked something obvious, something that would show the admiral that he wasn’t a serious person after all, still lurked in him. It was an old, familiar kind of fear, and he knew how to push it aside. A wire frame rendering of Medina floated in the air above the surface.

“Medina Station,” Singh said. “Assuming our intelligence is correct, it houses the hundreds of members of the planetary coalition and their personal staffs, including security. Add in the permanent staff and crew of the station, as well as trade union members passing through, and you get a conservative estimate of between three and five thousand people on the station at all times. I would guess the number is actually double that.”

“Assuming our intelligence is correct?”

“Passive monitoring, even over the course of years, will always have a greater opportunity for error than active examination. And the surface interference of the gates adds an additional level of error,” Singh said. The admiral grunted and waved him to continue. He spun the rendering of the station, and hard points on the surface became highlighted in red.

“The station itself is equipped with some defenses. A PDC network that provides missile defense brackets the station, and one torpedo launcher remains intact and usable from its Behemoth days. Eight rails, automated reloading system, we estimate a total capacity of forty missiles.”

“Nuclear?” the admiral asked.

“Almost certainly not. The lack of maneuvering capability and the confined nature of the ring hub makes high-yield weapons dangerous to the station itself.”

Singh adjusted the image and focused in on the hub station, a perfect sphere several kilometers across that sat at the center of the gate network. The purest and most active alien artifact in all the worlds they knew of. Dotted on the surface of the sphere were six massive rail-gun turrets.

“The station’s primary defense is an aging rail-gun network, first installed by Marco Inaros’ people, and disabled during the final conflict with his faction. These guns are placed so that at least three guns and as many as five can fire at any of the rings. They’re our design, from back when we were still supplying the Free Navy with weapons. Older, out of date now, but capable of sustained fire at thirty rounds per minute. Assuming, of course, that they haven’t made modifications to them.”

“The rail guns. In the ancient days back on Earth, they’d have cannons that could fire down into the harbors when enemy ships appeared. The defense of the sea from the land. We got rid of the land and the sea, but the logic of it stays the same. The more things change, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you think of them?” Trejo asked.

“The design is elegant. Placing the defense battery on the alien station is brilliant,” Singh said. He felt anxiety growing in his throat. Was this the answer Trejo was looking for? “Anyplace else, and the rail guns would have to compensate with thrusters. The station doesn’t move. Or maybe it moves and drags its entire local context with it. Either way, it avoids having to worry about Newton’s third law. And as long as it has ammunition, it can hold off attacks from any of the rings, or even several at once. Honestly, I’m going to be sorry to see it go.”

Trejo sighed. “Rebuiding them won’t be quick, that’s true. But we have to look at the long term. Even if a replacement battery takes months to install and test, it will last centuries. I wish we could take control of them ourselves. But that’s the Tempest’s first target, while you disable the station’s defenses. Then board and secure the station,” the admiral said.

“Yes, sir. Logistically, once the station’s defenses are secured and the rail-gun network is taken offline, the Gathering Storm’s Marines, which we’ve designated Task Force Rhino, can take operational control of the station within minutes. When we control their comm array and access to the hub space, we effectively control all communications and trade for the thirteen hundred worlds.”

“You’ll have operational control of the landing and securing Medina Station. Is the task force prepared?”

“Yes, Admiral. They’ve been drilling for this assignment for months, and my security chief is Colonel Tanaka. She is well respected.”

“Tanaka’s good. And good personnel are critical,” Trejo said. “What obstacles do you anticipate?”

“The ship traffic coming into and out from the hub space is unpredictable. It’s very likely that there will be one or more additional ships with some defensive capability beyond the use of drive plumes as weapons. How many and what their armaments are can’t be stated with certainty until we pass through the gate. Also, Medina Station has been in operation for decades, and with a mission significantly different from her original design. The information we have about the initial configuration will be badly out of date. When we take control, there is the possibility of some local resistance, though that should be minimal. After that, it’s a question of co-opting and improving the existing infrastructure, and coordinating the supply chains between the newer planets and the better established ones. Sol system included.”

“And then you fly a desk for a while,” the admiral said. “I’d have to think that’s the toughest part of your assignment. Getting thirteen hundred squabbling children to cooperate.”

“High Consul Duarte wrote the book on governmental trade-control theories, back when he was with the Martian Navy. It’s still the book we study at the academy. I’m prepared to enforce the new orders absolutely to the letter.”

“I’m sure you are. Duarte has an eye for talent, and he selected you personally,” the admiral said, then pointed at the briefing diagrams floating in the air between them. “And you certainly seem to have done your homework.”

“Yes, sir,” Singh said, then cleared his throat. “If I may speak freely, sir?”

“I think I already made my feelings on that clear.”

“Yes, sir,” Singh said, but the anxiety still tugged at him. “I’m absolutely certain of this portion of our plan. My worry is the Sol system. Intelligence says that the Earth-Mars Coalition has been steadily refitting and rebuilding their fleet. And that it is at least at the prewar levels of preparedness. When external resistance to our plan comes, it will come from them. And while we have newer ships, they have the benefit of an officer corps that fought in two serious wars in the last few decades. They will have vastly more battlefield experience to draw on.”

The admiral paused, considering him. The bright-green eyes seemed to dig under his skin. Singh couldn’t tell if the man was pleased or disappointed. When he smiled, it seemed genuine.

“Experience and home territory are real advantages for them, you’re right. But I think you shouldn’t worry about it overmuch,” the admiral said. “The Tempest was built for one purpose, and one purpose only. To render every other power in the known galaxy irrelevant.”