Rika Conqueror Read online

  Jeremy continued his hike, pushing forward, starting to feel an urgency to reach the falls.

  Something was wrong.

  The trail became more precipitous, moss on the rocks crowding the narrow path became slick and wet, offering no purchase. He slipped once and slammed his knee into a sharp root, ripping his pants. Though he was bleeding, Jeremy didn’t slow, pushing on faster and faster as the waterfall’s muted roar grew louder.

  The undergrowth grew thicker, obscuring his visibility as he clambered over roots and rocks. He looked around, suddenly realizing that he’d lost the trail altogether.

  It didn’t matter, he could hear the sound of the falls, he just had to keep moving toward it, pressing ever forward, though he knew not why.

  Jeremy pushed his way through a grouping of ferns and nearly fell when the plants gave way to reveal a boulder-strewn streambed. He made his way down the rocks, one eye on the waterfall to his right, one on the terrain he was clambering over.

  Then he rounded a large boulder and saw a sliver of red flowing past in the stream—a crimson highlight against the water’s reflection of the clear blue sky. His mind cried out in alarm, and he scrambled around the rock to see the broken body—

  A scream burst from Jeremy’s throat as he fell backward into the stream, struggling to regain his footing while the water tried to pull him under.

  “No!” he wailed, clawing at the water, feeling it wrap around his arms and pull him down. “Stop!”

  In an instant, the sounds of rushing water disappeared, and a bright light shone all around him.

  “Alarm off,” a robotic voice said, thrusting reality back into the fore.

  “Shit,” Jeremy muttered, looking down to see that his arms were tangled in his sheets.

  He extracted himself to find that his body was slick with sweat. Closing his eyes, he drew slow, shuddering breaths until the pounding in his chest slowed, then swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

  He lowered his face into his hands, wiping the tears from his cheeks with his palms, lips pursed tightly in an effort to keep further waterworks at bay.

  “I’m so sorry, Anatha,” he whispered. “I miss you so much.”

  It took ten minutes more for Jeremy to leave the comfort his bed, his final action before rising was the deletion of the ‘river sounds’ option from his alarm. He set it instead to a simple klaxon.

  At least that will wake me up immediately.

  He walked to the san and stepped into the shower, letting it wash away the tears and guilt, using the full ten-minute allotment before walking out and looking at himself in the wall’s holoprojection.

  His dark, ruddy skin held a hint of extra red from the hot water, and he shook his head, asking himself for the thousandth time what a dirt-sider like himself was doing on a place like Capeton Orbital.

  Out in his cabin’s mainspace, he saw that the small servitor had set out a meal of eggs and some sort of substance that was supposed to be bacon.

  “Baconesque,” he muttered to himself as he sat at the table and stared out through the porthole, sipping the coffee the servitor handed him.

  The view was the same as it always was these days: chaotic. The Capeton Yards were overflowing with ships. New hulls were being assembled at a near-frantic pace before being moved to long strings trailing from the surface of the dwarf planet below.

  Thousands of vessels, all in some stage of completion, all ultimately destined to do to some other people what the Nietzscheans had done to his.

  Funny how that works, Jeremy thought. They destroyed us, and now we make the tools they’re going to use to destroy someone else.

  His drinking buddies said—when they were drunk enough to say things that were better kept on the inside of one’s skull—that this was just the way things were now. For all intents and purposes, they were all Niets. Just trying to make quota and have some spare credit for a night when they’d try to forget what their lives had been reduced to.

  At times like that, Jeremy could only think of Shaya. If he set his window to dim Torell’s light, he could see his homeworld to the star’s left. A garden world, a place of endless beauty.

  A place Jeremy would never return to.

  “Ten minutes until your shuttle leaves,” the cabin system said aloud, startling Jeremy out of his reverie.

  “Shit, yeah,” he muttered before wolfing down the bacon substance—trying not to think of what it really was—before following it with the eggs. Those, at least, he was certain were real. The dwarf planet of Capeton was all but covered in chicken shit. Before the expansion of the shipyards, it had been known as the Egg Basket of Genevia.

  Now it was just where dreams went to die.

  He pulled on his bright yellow, form-fitting overalls that also doubled as his EV suit and grabbed his helmet, tucking it under an arm. He swept his gaze over the four-by-six-meter cube that was his home and disabled all the systems, not wanting to face another energy-overage charge.

  Once satisfied that everything was offline, he slid open his door and stepped out into the passageway, nearly colliding with Annie.

  “Shit, sorry,” he muttered sheepishly.

  “No worries,” Annie said, yawning and rolling her head as she waited for him to close his door. “I wasn’t watching where I was going. Literally. I was seeing if I could sleep and walk to the shuttle on autopilot.”

  Jeremy felt a smile creep onto his lips, but then willed it away, not feeling as though he had any right to smile at a beautiful woman’s humor.

  Annie was, quite simply, the bane of his existence.

  It wasn’t her fault, and he never told her how much it pained him to see her, choosing instead to weather his discomfort in silence.

  The thing that annoyed Jeremy about his reaction to Annie was that she was nothing like Anatha.

  Except for how she was exactly like Anatha.

  Anatha’s hair had been bright red, and Annie’s was a green and blue ombre. Anatha had been on the shorter side, while Annie was tall and willowy. Moreover, Anatha had always behaved with a calm decorum, while Annie was all but ribald.

  Nothing alike.

  But there was an undercurrent in Annie that reminded Jeremy so much of his wife. They both shared an unbridled excitement for life. They showed it in different ways, but at the core, the two women were so alike.

  “Heyoooo,” Annie said, waving a hand in front of Jeremy’s face. “You in there?”

  “Uh…sorry, yeah, just didn’t sleep well.”

  “You and me both,” she said as they began walking down the corridor. “I think it was because I ate the bacon yesterday. Had me in the san all night.”

  Jeremy’s head whipped around to look at Annie. “Shit, really? I just had so—”

  His statement was cut off by Annie’s laughter. “I’m kidding, Jere. I know you always have bacon and eggs. I’m just messing with you. I was entertaining last night, that’s all.”

  Jeremy pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “Oh, OK.”

  Annie always had a bit of extra credit, and it had taken him awhile to find out where it came from. It turned out that she operated what was known on Capeton Orbital as a ‘refreshment service’.

  He’d never availed himself of one, but it didn’t take a lot of imagination to know what sort of ‘refreshment’ Annie offered. Strangely, she’d never once suggested that he visit her cabin at night.

  Stars, am I glad for that. He harbored a suspicion that much of Annie’s self-worth was tied up in her ability to satisfy other people. If he declined her, she might take it as a personal affront, and then he’d lose one of the few friends he had.

  “Just bad dreams for me,” he said after a moment.

  He’d told her once about what had happened on Shaya, why he’d left the world. He hadn’t meant to, but Annie was a good listener and asked the right sort of questions to draw things out of a person.

  Half the time, he wondered if
she’d been a psychiatrist before the war, though she never volunteered that information, and he never asked.

  Annie bumped her shoulder against his, giving him a silent nod of solidarity as they turned left at the first intersection, moving toward the maglev at the end of the residential block.

  Stars, she always seems to know just what a person needs. Just like–

  “Hey! Wait up, you two!”

  “So much for a nice, quiet, wake-up walk,” Annie said with a wink, then looked over her shoulder. “Par, seriously? ‘Wait up’? We’re already almost late. Why don’t you hustle up for once?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Par replied as he caught up with the pair. “I was out drinking with the guys from G6 last night. They were telling me how we’re all getting shuffled over to the Pinnacle today.”

  “Really?” Annie’s eyes widened. “Wow. That’ll be…” she snorted for emphasis, “a real ‘pinnacle’. Stars, Niets and their starship names. They should just own it and name them ‘Awesome’ and ‘Awesomer’.”

  “Might be hard to communicate in combat,” Jeremy said.

  “I can see it now.” Par chuckled as he swiped a hand through the air. “Awesome Seven-Ninety-One to Awesomer Eleven-Forty-Two, come in, Awesomer Eleven-Forty-Two.”

  “Not even the Niets are that stupid,” Jeremy said.

  “You sure?” Annie asked. “Just yesterday, I heard that they’re gonna start mining Londinium’s moons, starting with Illium.”

  “OK, I take that back,” Jeremy replied. “They’re deeply stupid. That moon’s one mining detonation from grinding itself to gravel.”

  “Maybe that’s their plan,” Par suggested. “Smash the moon and just scoop shit up.”

  “Who do they think they are, the FGT?” Annie snickered. “Gonna take a lot of a-grav to stabilize a mess like that. Just glad we didn’t get that duty.”

  “Stars, that would be extra stupid,” Par replied. “Sending drive techs out to work a mine.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time,” Jeremy said, his tone ominous.

  The other two nodded silently, thinking of friends who had been assigned dangerous jobs after they’d said the wrong thing with the wrong ears nearby. With thousands of ships under construction at any time, there was no shortage of dangerous jobs that had low survival rates.

  Before the surge, much of the construction at the Capeton shipyards had been automated, but when the emperor demanded that the shipyards triple their output, the demand for ship components put expanded automation lower on the list of priorities.

  Especially with a populace that the Nietzscheans had no problem burning through.

  The trio arrived at the maglev station just as a car pulled up, and Par laughed. “See? No need to rush. Orbital runs on my schedule.”

  “Just keep telling yourself that,” Annie said. “Orbital barely runs these days. You’re just lucky.”

  As though to emphasize her point, the local a-grav fluctuated, making Jeremy feel like his stomach had just visited his lungs.

  “Stars…when are they going to fix that? If Orbital falls onto Capeton, it’s gonna make a hell of a mess.”

  “You’re DCS-L9,” Par said. “You tell me how an a-grav hiccup could make the station fall.”

  Jeremy resisted the urge to give Par a scathing look as he responded, “Because every time a-grav cuts out like that, things wobble. You wobble enough of the station often enough, and it starts to shift out of its orbit. Remember, a-grav actually increases mass as it pushes in the other direction, converting energy to gravitons.”

  “Yeah, but not that much mass,” Par countered.

  “Sure, and if it wasn’t for the fact that half the attitude thrusters on Orbital are garbage, it wouldn’t be anything to worry about. But this station still has systems that haven’t been repaired since the war. Stars, they were going to scrap it, until the surge.”

  “I guess you make a good point,” the other man said as the maglev took off.

  Conversation died off at that point, then came and went a few times as the maglev whisked the group around to the docks where their crew’s shuttle awaited.

  They were the last to arrive at the departure bay, and the crew chief was waiting outside the shuttle as the trio approached.

  “Well, well, you did decide to show up. How nice.”

  Annie gave the Nietzschean a winning smile. “Sorry, Flo, the maglev we were on had to take the long way—a-grav issues.”

  “Sure, sure,” Flo replied. “Just get on the shuttle. Fuckin’ Neeves.”

  Jeremy led the way onto the craft and found a seat toward the back, catching a few annoyed looks from the rest of the team. Annie sat beside him, while Par found a seat one row back.

  “OK, people,” Flo bellowed as she followed the trio onto the shuttle. “You might have heard that we’re switching over to the Pinnacle today. Fucker’s behind, and the emperor wants to move in, so we’re going to lend a hand with the engines. They’re having trouble balancing thrust in the simulated runs, and it’s going to be on us to figure out why and get that sucker ready for a full test burn—which is scheduled for tomorrow.”

  There were several grumbles, but Flo’s angry gaze swept across the group.

  “I’ve put up all the specs and issues the current team’s having. Study up. That hull’s your home till we figure this out.”

  Jeremy accessed the team’s shared datastore and pulled up the specs on the Pinnacle’s engines. The ship was a new design, one that seemed utterly nonsensical to him. He’d heard some of the other drive control engineers referred to the ship as a ‘space catamaran’, though that was a vast oversimplification.

  In some respects, the Pinnacle was seven ships in one.

  The main hull was a six-kilometer-long cylinder. It was just over a kilometer in diameter, and on its own would have made for a serious amount of mass to move through space. Like most larger ships, it had engines fore and aft, though the rear ones were much larger.

  Balancing thrust along six klicks of hull was no simple task, but that was just the beginning of the troubles with the Pinnacle. In addition to the main hull, the ship had six other cylindrical hulls encircling the central shaft, each of which had its own engines.

  From what Jeremy had heard, the smaller hulls could fold in close to the central one, though he had no idea why such a thing would be necessary.

  Sure makes for some complex mechanical systems, he thought, considering the strain the struts and gimbals that held the whole system together must need to withstand.

  The design requirements for the ship were mind-numbing, stipulating that the ship needed to be able to obtain full thrust in either configuration—though, thankfully, not while transitioning between the two.

  He saw the root problem that the drive technicians were having almost right away. When the secondary hulls folded in close, the struts pivoted laterally around the ship, drastically changing the mass allocation across the massive vessel.

  In theory, this wasn’t a huge problem, because each of the secondary hulls were identical, but in reality, that was never the case.

  Some clever person had decided to make it so that all the hulls could rotate, a measure to ensure that beams would have a hard time tagging a fixed point on the ship for long.

  In short, there was no consistent balance to the ship. Add in the fact that the thing all but bristled with beams and rails, and it was a miracle that the ship was expected to fly at all.

  Annie said privately a few seconds later.

 

  Jeremy was already lost in possible solutions to the problems the design proposed. In theory, the engineers who came up with the Pinnacle’s design had solutions to the practical problems the construction teams were facing, and he was looking through those, lo
oking for the twist.

  He liked to think of these sorts of challenges like he was reading a mystery novel. Engineers who designed starships weren’t idiots. They didn’t design space vehicles that were inherently flawed.

  However, they also couldn’t consider every variable. A billion components went into building a warship, and between the initial design of a ship and its construction, many of those components could change, either because they were replaced with newer variants, a downstream supplier changed, or they were simply rendered obsolete by a newer technology.

  In the end, the starship that was built had thousands of small alterations that the designers never planned for.

  Bit by bit, those differences added up, until they started to affect major systems in the ship. Teams compensated in a host of ways to ensure their areas of concern performed to spec, but often, those changes affected other systems, cascading shifts in spec and performance throughout the vessel.

  To Jeremey’s mind, constructing a starship was a lot like balancing out an ecosystem. A lot of give and take, push and pull, had to occur before an equilibrium was found.

  He knew they could find it for the Pinnacle, but he had no idea if it could be done in the timeframe that Flo had stipulated.

  he replied after a minute.

  Annie replied. Then she gave a sour laugh, glancing over at him. “And we just have to figure it out within a day.”

  Jeremy nodded, turning to glance out the window as the shuttle lifted off and flew out of the bay on Capeton Orbital.

  “Yeah, sure. Piece of cake.”

  CHANGE OF COURSE

  STELLAR DATE: 02.06.8950 (Adjusted Years)

  LOCATION: MSS Fury Lance, 15LY from Parsons System

  REGION: Interstellar Dark Layer, Old Genevia, Nietzschean Empire

  “Any word from Chase, yet?” Heather asked as Rika walked onto the Fury Lance’s bridge.