Capital Starship (Ixan Legacy Book 1) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Free Book

  Chapter 1: Shattered Peace

  Chapter 2: Cybele

  Chapter 3: Military Applications

  Chapter 4: Human or Good

  Chapter 5: PTSD

  Chapter 6: Anything Anomalous

  Chapter 7: Owning the Floor

  Chapter 8: The Quince Engagement

  Chapter 9: Feeling Unsafe

  Chapter 10: Scapegoated for Wrongs

  Chapter 11: As Carbon Steel

  Chapter 12: Vanguard

  Chapter 13: Tactical and Strategic Interests

  Chapter 14: Debris Cloud

  Chapter 15: As Though in a Warzone

  Chapter 16: Defense Platform 5

  Chapter 17: Progenitors

  Chapter 18: Surface Tension

  Chapter 19: Superheating

  Chapter 20: On the Local Galactic Cluster

  Chapter 21: It Rings True

  Chapter 22: Fairly Specific Intel

  Chapter 23: Head Fascist

  Chapter 24: Asleep to Awake

  Chapter 25: A Respect for Competence

  Chapter 26: Warp

  Chapter 27: Bash Back

  Chapter 28: The Secured Zone

  Chapter 29: Thumbs-Down

  Chapter 30: A Ship That Size

  Chapter 31: Blood on Hands

  Chapter 32: Morality of War

  Chapter 33: Invertebrate

  Chapter 34: Not Compulsory

  Chapter 35: Nonattendance Day

  Chapter 36: A Lucky Guess

  Chapter 37: Scythes Through Wheat

  Chapter 38: What Toxic Actually Looks Like

  Chapter 39: Both Killers

  Chapter 40: Belay That Order

  Chapter 41: The Taste of Sweat and Fear

  Chapter 42: Brittle Silence

  Chapter 43: Evil

  Chapter 44: Innumerable

  Chapter 45: Staring Back in Shock

  Chapter 46: Copper Taste

  Chapter 47: Supposed to Feel Like That

  Chapter 48: Every Crease

  Chapter 49: War Is Not Safe

  Chapter 50: Old School

  Chapter 51: Unbridled

  Chapter 52: What It Means to Tangle

  Chapter 53: Below the Ecliptic

  Chapter 54: Peacetime Soldiers

  Chapter 55: Ripped to Pieces

  Chapter 56: Teth's Gambits

  Chapter 57: No Pressure

  Chapter 58: Major Peter Gamble

  Chapter 59: Seems Irrational

  Chapter 60: If the Captain's Left Us to Die

  Chapter 61: Knots of Tension

  Chapter 62: Shoot to Kill

  Chapter 63: No Such Luck

  Chapter 64: Pieces

  Chapter 65: Not the Time

  Epilogue: Jake Price

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Supercarrier excerpt

  Chapter 2: Thessaly

  Capital Starship

  By Scott Bartlett

  Book 1 of Ixan Legacy, a military science fiction series.

  Capital Starship

  © Scott Bartlett 2017

  Cover art by Tom Edwards (tomedwardsdesign.com)

  This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

  This novel is a work of fiction. All of the characters, places, and events are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, locales, businesses, or events is entirely coincidental.

  Captain and Command

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  Chapter 1

  Shattered Peace

  The Gok carrier bore down on the Vesta, and Captain Vin Husher cursed under his breath. The alien warship was clearly maneuvering for tactical advantage, but until it fired the first shot, there was nothing Husher could do.

  With bureaucrats scrutinizing his every move, commanding the largest warship in the Integrated Galactic Fleet counted for less than it should have. He certainly felt less effective as a captain. The voices calling for his removal from the Vesta’s command seat seemed to grow louder and more numerous with every passing day, and it took everything he had to continue presenting himself as not only fit for command, but the best man for the job.

  Of course, ideas about what “the job” actually was tended to vary dramatically. The way he saw it, his job was to prepare the galaxy for the onslaught he knew was coming. He knew that in his very core, which made it especially baffling when others described his “proper” job as doing his best to render war itself obsolete.

  That particular view of his job had gained widespread popularity over the last twenty years, and these days, his every action was held up to a microscope, along with its justification, which he was required to provide in the reams of paperwork that had come to characterize his life.

  He agreed with civilian oversight of the military, in principle. But he also thought that oversight should come from a well-informed, well-reasoned place. Sadly, it rarely did, anymore.

  The politicians of the Interstellar Union hadn’t seen what he’d seen. They hadn’t experienced the ruthlessness of the Ixa in battle, and they hadn’t heard the conviction of the Ixan AI named Baxa, when he’d told Husher that he was but one of many superintelligences designed for war. The AI had promised that the others would come soon to finish the job of exterminating all life in the Milky Way.

  In the meantime, there was this warship from the Gok, with whom the IU had enjoyed an uneasy peace for the last seventeen years. The Union did everything they could to maintain that peace, including mandating ROEs that left its own warships at a disadvantage against any Gok ship that might decide to attack.

  “They’re not acknowledging our transmission request, Captain.” The Coms officer almost whispered as she delivered the news. She was Ensign Amy Fry, and she sat two consoles over from Husher’s, just ahead and a foot lower. Like every other officer in the CIC, she faced the main display.

  “Keep trying,” Husher said, his voice tight with strain, even though he was trying his best to seem calm. Though unlikely, the possibility that the other vessel’s coms simply weren’t functioning would be enough to sink Husher’s career if he fired first. Never mind that the Gok was the only species with whom the Interstellar Union had gone to war against during the twenty years since its inception, or that the Gok still steadfastly refused to join the federation that included every other sentient species in the galaxy.

  “Sir…” muttered Commander Fesky, Husher’s XO, her twitching wings betraying her unease. Not that he needed the indication—he’d served with her since just before the Second Galactic War, and Husher could read his Winger friend like a favorite book.

  But that wouldn’t stop him from observing protocol. “Easy, Commander. I’m not about to go down in history as the captain who fired the first shot in the renewed Gok Wars.” Even so…. He turned to his Nav officer. “Initiate reverse thrust, Kaboh, engaging engines at sixty-five percent. Let’s start inching back toward Zakros’ orbital defense platforms.”

  “Aye, Captain,” Lieutenant Commander Kaboh answered in the high-pitched tones of a Kaithian—one of the few that were aboard the Vesta. Most of Kaboh’s species preferred to remain close together, where the bene
fits of their psychic Consensus was multiplied. But under the direction of the Interstellar Union, the Fleet had assigned Kaboh to serve in Husher’s CIC, and Husher was pretty sure he knew why.

  “The Gok carrier has doubled its acceleration, Captain,” the sensor operator reported, from two consoles to Husher’s right. “Her main gun is aligned with our forward starboard engine.”

  Husher’s fingers tightened around the cold steel of his chair’s armrests. Peering at the CIC’s main display, he raised his right hand to a sturdy white switch positioned on the side of his console, flicking from a tactical representation of the two warships to the view from an exterior visual sensor. It showed mostly empty space at the moment; the Gok ship nothing more than a distant gleam.

  Flicking the ivory switch once again, Husher changed the display back to a tactical overview. That likely wouldn’t be what the other officers saw on the display. When his Coms officer looked at the main display, she likely saw a data readout on the warship’s communications array, or maybe reports from subordinates in her department as they worked together to hail the Gok ship. The sensor operator would likely be managing multiple streams of information provided by various sensor types—RADAR, LIDAR, visual, and so on.

  Of course, Chief Benno Tremaine, his Tactical officer, probably did have the tactical display up, alongside multiple targeting calculations. Husher had long ago drilled into the man’s head that he should always be ready with multiple firing solutions whenever a nearby ship had even the slimmest chance of becoming violent. It was far more efficient to modify an existing firing solution than to whip up one from scratch.

  Without Oculenses, it wouldn’t have been possible for each officer to see something different on the main display—the invention had certainly been a boon for CIC operations. The public had found plenty of other uses for Oculenses, of course, but Husher didn’t consider all of those to be quite as beneficial.

  As captain, he could tap into what any of his CIC’s officers were looking at while they were on duty. He did so now, switching to his sensor operator’s overlay. “Winterton, collaborate with Nav to provide me with an estimate of when the carrier will enter an optimal range for—”

  “Captain, the carrier just launched two squadrons of third-generation Slags!”

  Husher’s head whipped toward his Tactical officer. Normally, his sensor operator would have delivered that information, but Winterton had been looking away from his readout, at Husher.

  “Have any of them started firing?” Husher asked. Slags were the Gok’s idea of space fighters, so-named for their close resemblance to melted hunks of metal.

  “Negative.”

  With the Vesta’s present course locked in, Kaboh didn’t have much to do. His muscular head-tail shifted against his chair’s back as he turned toward Husher, looking totally relaxed. “Captain, I would remind you that the presiding ROEs prohibit—”

  “I’m familiar with the ROEs,” Husher snapped. “Helm, punch the engines up to eighty percent.”

  “The Slags will overtake us at this rate, Captain,” Winterton said.

  “They’ll overtake us no matter what we do,” Husher muttered. His ship’s top speed was—well, it was superluminal, thanks to the warp tech that had come online fleet-wide during the last five years. But her sheer mass meant that accelerating to any meaningful velocity took time, even if he were to have his Helm officer bring the engines up to full power.

  Slowly, he shook his head, his heart pounding an increasing cadence in his ears. The Vesta truly was a wonder—much bigger and far more powerful than anything ever fielded before her. But her capabilities were nearly wasted under the limitations the interspecies government had placed on military action. Husher had been expecting a situation like the one developing right now for a long time. It was just his luck that it was happening to him—and at a time when the battle group that normally accompanied his ship was already halfway to the darkgate into the next system.

  “Ready point defense systems, Tactical,” Husher growled, eyeing Kaboh as he finished. “Unless you’re going to tell me the ROEs forbid that, now?”

  “No more than they forbid readying firing solutions for ships that never end up attacking us, Captain,” the Kaithian said, his tone conspicuously neutral.

  Husher caught himself grinding his teeth at the implied dig, and he forced himself to stop. Modern military doctrine gave subordinates far more leeway when criticizing their superiors than was once considered proper. The thinking was that encouraging debate would reduce mistakes made by the CO and others in command positions.

  Husher wasn’t so sure about that, but he did know that the freer dialog did real harm to discipline and the chain of command.

  It doesn’t help that Kaboh’s real job is to spy on me for the IU, Husher reflected.

  “Still no response from the Gok commander,” the Coms officer said, and the sensor operator spoke on the heels of that: “Enemy—uh, Gok Slags are drawing even with us, Captain.” Winterton blushed as Kaboh’s widened eyes fell on him. No doubt the Kaithian was outraged at the sensor operator for ‘prematurely’ classifying the aggressively maneuvering ships as enemies.

  Fortunately for the young ensign—though unfortunate for the Vesta—his slip-up was vindicated almost immediately. “The carrier just fired two guided missiles!” he said.

  Good enough for me. “Tactical, tell Commander Ayam to scramble Pythons, prioritizing enemy Slags as targets,” Husher rattled off, his speech as rapid and clipped as machine gun fire. “I don’t want those missiles getting anywhere near my hull—neutralize them with a pair of Gorgons.” With their advanced stealth capabilities, Gorgons would likely be perfect, since the Gok missiles’ sensors weren’t sophisticated enough to detect the threat in time to adjust course. Gorgon missiles were propelled by cold-gas thrusters, and they were covered in the darkest material ever made, which absorbed all but one-hundredth of one percent of the light it encountered.

  “The carrier’s continuing to accelerate, Captain,” the sensor operator said. “I think they’re aiming to ram us.”

  Husher’s gaze snapped to the tactical display. I can’t believe it. Even during the Gok Wars, only two of the Gok’s warships had ever attempted a kamikaze run. This really isn’t my day, is it? “Nav, evasive maneuvers, now!” he barked.

  “Aye, Captain,” Kaboh said, tiny blue-white fingers flying across his console.

  But as the Vesta listed to port, its starboard thrusters firing, the Gok warship turned as well, its main gun tracking the supercarrier’s trajectory.

  It was a feint. “Helm, engines all ahead!” he yelled.

  “Yes, sir,” the Helm officer said, but it was too late. The Vesta had no time to overcome the inertia from her recent reverse thrust, and while her engines were powerful, the Gok’s trickery paid off. Kinetic impactors tore into the supercarrier’s starboard side near the stern, sending violent tremors through her entire frame and rocking Husher in his seat.

  He tried to give another order, but his throat had closed up, and his ears began to ring shrilly. Dark spots danced before his eyes, and suddenly a memory overtook him, so vividly that he might have been watching a vid:

  A white clapboard house, standing proud in the suburbs. Lights on in both the living room and upstairs washroom, piercing the deepening dusk.

  Then: a fiery gash across the night sky. A deafening explosion. Fire that blossomed until it engulfed the entire house.

  “Captain?” It was Fesky, who’d risen from the XO’s Chair and was standing over him, shaking him. “Captain!”

  “Hit them,” he managed to gasp. “Hit them with everything we’ve got.”

  Chapter 2

  Cybele

  Husher and Fesky walked in silence as they neared the hatch where the crew section of the Vesta ended, their muffled footfalls the only sound other than the rustling of the Winger’s feathers.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Fesky asked, shattering the quiet. “Back in the CIC
…I wasn’t sure you’d make it through the engagement. What happened?”

  “I’m not sure, exactly. But we won, Fesky. That’s what matters. We took out the Gok carrier before it could do the same to us.”

  “Don’t you think you should see Doctor Bancroft?”

  He shrugged. “I have a checkup soon. I’ll mention what happened to her then.”

  Fesky sighed, shaking her head a little. “I can come with you to this meeting, you know. You don’t have to go alone.”

  A wry smile played across Husher’s lips. “No thanks, Fesky. I’m not eager to leave the CIC to Kaboh for longer than I already have. I’m worried he’ll go looking for another Gok warship, so he can offer them the Vesta on a platter. I’m fine, and at a time like this, I want you in the command seat.”

  The Gok had always been close allies of the Ixa, and Husher didn’t want to give voice to his worst fear, even though it was probably on Fesky’s mind, too: that the Gok attack might have something to do with the return of the AIs who’d created the Ixa.

  “Understood,” the Winger said, reaching up to straighten his uniform’s lapel using the flat of her thickest talon. “This isn’t ironed properly, by the way.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t. With the amount of paperwork I do every day, it’s a wonder I get a chance to eat.”

  “You could easily have someone iron it for you.”

  “A captain should iron his own uniform,” he said, turning toward the hatch and punching his access code into the terminal.

  “But you clearly aren’t doing it properly, human!” Fesky called after him as he strode through the hatch. He didn’t turn back, not wanting her to witness the return of his smile.

  Husher exited the corridor into a vast desert that stretched from horizon to horizon, dotted with cacti and rocks and not much else. Where the desert would have met the sky, it met the base of snowcapped mountains instead. By all appearances, he stood in the center of an enormous valley.

  When he turned to ensure the hatch had closed automatically, he saw that it had—a disembodied metal barrier, stark against the gleaming white of the barren wilderness. An access panel hung in midair beside it. Nodding to himself, Husher turned and continued on his way.