Ballistic (The Palladium Wars) Read online

  ALSO BY MARKO KLOOS

  FRONTLINES

  Terms of Enlistment

  Lines of Departure

  Angles of Attack

  Chains of Command

  Fields of Fire

  Points of Impact

  Measures of Absolution (A Frontlines Kindle novella)

  “Lucky Thirteen” (A Frontlines Kindle short story)

  THE PALLADIUM WARS

  Aftershocks

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Marko Kloos

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542090056 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542090059 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542090070 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542090075 (paperback)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  First edition

  For Lyra, the artist. I love you as much as you don’t love hugs.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  When it is peace, then we may view again

  With new-won eyes each other’s truer form

  And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm

  We’ll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,

  When it is peace. But until peace, the storm,

  The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

  —Charles Hamilton Sorley

  CHAPTER 1

  ADEN

  Zephyr streaked through the void faster than Aden had ever traveled before. Faster than most people have ever traveled before, he corrected himself as he watched the holographic plot on the top bulkhead. They were hurtling down the dotted trajectory of the current shortest-time traffic lane from Rhodia to Pallas, the small mountain planet that made the most distant orbit around the system’s sun. The acceleration readout next to Zephyr’s icon showed the improbable number of fifteen g. Most civilian ships maxed out at seven or eight, and even warships rarely managed more than ten. At some point, gravmag generators demanded an infinite amount of energy, and then the laws of physics kicked in and imposed a hard speed limit.

  “T-minus eight for turnaround burn,” Maya, the pilot, announced from her workstation up on the command deck. She was fully in her element, both hands on the flight controls, comfortably reclining in her gravity couch. Aden had been on Zephyr for three months, and this was the first time they were pushing the engine hard enough against the gravmag generator’s limit to feel the weight of uncompensated acceleration.

  Zephyr was roughly the same size as Cloud Dancer, the ill-fated ship that had carried Aden off Rhodia three months ago, but that was where the similarities ended. Cloud Dancer had been old and worn, with the marks of many years of interplanetary travel. Zephyr looked far more polished. Everything on board worked the way it had been designed, and nothing was worn out or broken. It was easily the most modern ship Aden had ever seen, although his sample size was admittedly small and consisted mostly of well-used Gretian Navy ships. His berthing compartment was just as small as the one on Cloud Dancer, but it was much more comfortable, with well-thought-out storage cubbies and a retractable toilet-and-sink combo. It was claustrophobic compared to the officer-sized residence unit in the Rhodian prison arcology, but Aden had gotten used to the smaller space. In a way, it was cozier than his old residence unit, which had always felt empty and impersonal because he never had enough belongings to fill it up and make it his own.

  “What’s the status of our slow friends?” Captain Decker asked.

  Next to Aden, Henry Siboniso, the ship’s first officer, used the controls suspended in front of his gravity couch to increase the scale of the holographic plot projection until it showed most of the space between Zephyr and Pallas. He highlighted a ship icon labeled OMV LADY MINA and clicked his tongue.

  “They’re not even at turnaround yet,” Henry said. “Going down the track at a steady ten point two. Unless they find an extra notch or two on their throttle, we’ll beat them by almost an hour.”

  Decker chuckled softly. “Well, the bet was their idea. Not that we stand to win much after we fill up again at Pallas.”

  “We could back off a g or two,” Maya suggested. “Save some reactor fuel. We’ll still beat them. It’s first past the inner marker, not first one to dock.”

  “Crew poll,” Decker said. “It’s everyone’s money, after all. Sound off. Who wants to save a few thousand on the fuel bill? We’ll stand to make profit on the bet if we don’t blow the whole wager out of the drive cone.”

  “Not me. I’ll kick in a few hundred if I have to,” Maya said without taking her eyes off the control screen in front of her. She looked like she was having way too good of a time to even consider her own proposal.

  “If you’re going to show off, might as well show off big,” Henry said.

  “I don’t care for this extended high-g shit, but I can suffer it for a little while longer, I guess,” Tristan Dorn said from his gravity couch behind Aden. He was the ship’s medic and the oldest member of the crew, a tall and lanky Oceanian in his fifties with a craggy face and short white hair. Aden found it liberating that almost everyone on Zephyr was his own age or older, and far more experienced. Only Maya, the pilot, and Tess, the engineer, were not in their forties yet. It was the first time since his early days in the Blackguards that he was the most junior and least experienced member of a team, but there was a certain freedom in taking orders instead of giving them, in learning instead of having to be responsible for someone else’s development.

  As their new linguist, he’d been hired to do all the talking and listening whenever the crew needed someone who was completely fluent in Rhodian or Gretian. Universal-translator AI was incredibly useful for everyday interactions between people from different cultures, but even with quantum-state computing, it couldn’t catch nuance, dialect, or inflection as well as a multilingual human could. And Zephyr sometimes moved in circles where people didn’t want to be easily understood by outsiders.

  “What about you, Aden?” Captain Decker asked. “You want to keep the throttle open, or have a little more money in your ledger when we dock?”

  “I get a vote, too?”

  “Of course you do. You’re a member of the crew. Profits get split eight ways. The more fuel we burn, the smaller the payout once we get to Pallas. Might be nothing left over when Lady Mina pays up.”

  “What’s the advantage of staying on the throttle if we’re going to win either way?” Aden aske
d.

  “It’s good advertising,” Decker said. She pointed at the situational display projected above them. “Every ship in the neighborhood has us on their plots right now. And the telemetry data from our transponder is public record.”

  “Everyone with a comtab can get on the Mnemosyne and see that this ship can do fifteen g sustained,” Henry added. “Reminds people where to look if they need to hire a fast courier.”

  “Then let’s keep the throttle open,” Aden said. “That bet was bonus money anyway, right? Might as well invest it on advertising.”

  Decker’s brief smile told Aden that she approved of his vote. He had gone out of his way to be agreeable as a new member of the crew, and he’d mostly gone with whatever he perceived to be the majority consensus. Fortunately, the other crew members were easy enough to get along with. Aden was glad he no longer had to mediate disputes or deal with the social dynamics of an entire company of troops that had been mostly in their teens and twenties when the war ended, and who had never known anything but top-down discipline.

  “Tess?” Decker asked the last person on the maneuvering deck who hadn’t voiced an opinion yet.

  “Keep going. And we have a bit more zip in reserve, if you want to open it up a little more,” Tess said from her gravity couch. She was scrolling through data readouts on her chair’s control tab, and there wasn’t a bit of strain in her voice from the added gravity of acceleration.

  “We’re going plenty fast for a good show. No need to go all out and tip our hand,” Decker said. “Save the reserve for when we need it. All right, six votes for, none against. Steady as she goes, Maya.”

  “That’s affirmative. T-minus six to turnaround,” Maya said. “Lady Mina is still on inbound burn, still chugging at nine point two g.”

  “They can kiss that pot goodbye already,” Henry said with satisfaction in his voice. Except for him and Maya, the crew was Oceanian, so that was the language they usually spoke on the ship, and Henry’s Palladian-accented Oceanian sounded strangely musical to Aden, who wasn’t used to hearing that inflection. Henry Siboniso had a deep voice, and his low register combined with the Palladian habit of softening consonants made him sound almost mournful.

  “I think we gave ourselves a fair handicap. And they accepted the terms. I can’t help it if we’re still the fastest kids in the neighborhood,” Decker said.

  Aden had expected the turnaround burn transition to be unpleasant, but Maya handled the ship as if they were transporting a thousand crates of fresh eggs in the cargo hold. The gravity couches were on floor-mounted gimbals. The computer pivoted them to minimize acceleration forces as Maya flipped the ship end over end to commence the deceleration burn. Aden couldn’t tell if it was her manual skill on the throttle or merely sophisticated piloting software, but the acceleration faded out and returned so gradually that his couch didn’t have any work to do. There were a few moments of near weightlessness that made his stomach rise a little, and then the acceleration readout was climbing once more until Aden felt the weight of uncorrected gravity settling on his chest again.

  “Turnaround complete. Estimated time to the inner marker is one hour, fifteen minutes, thirty-seven seconds,” Maya announced to the maneuvering deck.

  “You want to get something from Rhodia to Pallas any faster, you have to strap it to a missile,” Tess said next to Aden. Every member of the crew wore overalls, but Tess was the only one who had hers slipped down to her waist, with the sleeves tied like a belt. Tess’s internal thermostat seemed to run about five degrees higher than everyone else’s. Much of the time, she wore just a sleeveless black compression shirt underneath her overalls that showed off the skin art on her well-toned arms, beautiful pictures of wolves and foxes done in color-changing ink. He hadn’t been around people with tattoos very much because body art was not allowed in the Gretian military, and it surprised him to realize that he found it attractive, at least on Tess. It matched her personality somehow.

  “What if the gravmag array fails while we’re pulling this much acceleration?” Aden asked, and he regretted it right away when he found that he didn’t really want to hear the answer. Tess supplied it anyway.

  “You’ll die of a cerebral hemorrhage in about ten seconds,” she said in a tone that sounded almost cheerful. “I’ll die in fifteen. Maya can probably hang on for twenty. Fifteen gravities will knock us all out before Maya can back off the burn. But don’t worry. Those arrays are super reliable.”

  “Don’t let her freak you out. The fail-safe circuit runs on palladium pathways. It will cut the thrust in about ten nanoseconds,” Maya contributed from above. “We’ll all just have a bitch of a hangover. Maybe a nosebleed or two.”

  “Good to know,” Aden said. “Has that ever happened before?”

  “Not yet. But we hardly ever push fifteen plus. Everything running at near max, it cranks up the chance of system failure.” Tess put her head back against the headrest of the gravity couch and closed her eyes.

  “Outer marker coming up in sixteen minutes,” Maya said. “Our exhaust plume is something else. They can probably spot us on infrared all the way from Acheron.”

  “Aden, contact Pallas Center and knock on the door,” Captain Decker said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Aden brought up the comms screen on his control pad, grateful for something to do. His previous communications experience had been limited to the military protocol in basic training, and he hadn’t touched a comms console in half a decade before he joined the Zephyr crew, but modern comms gear interfaces were almost as easy to figure out as comtabs. Henry had trained him on the comms station for two weeks until the first officer had been satisfied that Aden had learned the ins and outs of the gear. He selected the approach channel for Pallas Station and sent a handshake sequence, then went through the voice protocol.

  “Pallas Center, OMV-2022 at sixteen to the outer marker, requesting approach vector for Pallas One dock.”

  “OMV-2022, proceed direct middle marker via route Delta.”

  “Proceed direct middle marker via route Delta, OMV-2022,” Aden read back. The voice comms were mostly a courteous formality because the data link between the ship and the control center showed the same information on the navigation console before the voice exchange was even finished, but old rituals died hard even in the age of instant system-wide data traffic.

  “We’re in the queue for Pallas One,” Aden reported to the command deck.

  “Thank you. Now get Lady Mina on comms so we can gloat a little.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Private or general?”

  “Use tight-beam, our ears only. Nobody else needs to know about our little wager.”

  “Affirmative.” Aden opened a tight-beam connection to the other ship. Instead of broadcasting their conversation on the general channel or using voice-to-data over the Mnemosyne, Zephyr’s comms computer directed a laser emitter at Lady Mina’s hull so they could talk via direct private connection. There were ways to eavesdrop on a tight-beam link, but it was much harder to do than intercepting the data stream on the Mnemosyne or simply running an encrypted radio broadcast through a decryption algorithm. It took the computer a few seconds to align the emitter and take aim at Lady Mina, which was still accelerating toward their turnaround burn marker somewhere on the track ahead of Zephyr.

  “Lady Mina, this is Zephyr. I have the captain on the link for you.”

  “Go ahead, Zephyr.”

  “We’re doing our deceleration burn right now,” Captain Decker said. “I think at this point it’s pretty safe to say we’ll be docking before you do.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m still holding out hope. If your containment field shits the bed, you’ll overshoot and miss your approach by half a day at your speed.”

  “That’s not likely to happen,” Decker replied.

  “Not likely. Not impossible either. We’ll transfer the pot when we see your docking link popping up on the ’Syne. And gods. I knew you were faste
r, but I had no idea how much.”

  “Yeah, she can work up a fair sprint,” Decker replied. “We’ll see you all at Trader Khan’s in a few. And remember to pay up the minute we dock. Zephyr out.”

  “Trader Khan’s,” Tristan said, in a tone that sounded like reverence and dread in equal measure. “Haven’t been there in, what, six months?”

  He looked at Aden and grinned.

  “You’ve never been to Trader Khan’s.”

  “Never been to Pallas,” Aden confirmed.

  “They serve some fierce chow. Hottest food this side of Acheron. Last time I had their spicy goat tarkari, I was feeling the burn for two days, if you know what I mean.”

  “They make you pick a hotness grade when you order,” Tess added. “Scale of one to ten. Only pick a number above five if you are used to Acheroni or Palladian food. And only go all the way up to ten if you don’t mind chemical burns on your esophagus.”

  “If nothing falls off the ship in the next hour and a half, we even stand to make a bit of money on the bet,” Decker said from above.

  The command deck had only two gravity couches on it, one for the pilot and one for the captain, so Decker and Maya were always three meters above everyone else when the ship was at maneuvering stations. Aden still wasn’t fully used to the difference in orientation between a building on flat ground in normal g and a starship under acceleration. The top of the ship was the front while they were in motion, but when the drive and the gravmag rotor were off, there was no front or back, up or down. Aden was used to living his life in the horizontal plane, but on spaceships, everything was oriented vertically, small decks stacked on top of each other like the floors in a tall and narrow high-rise building.

  “How are we doing with thermal management?” Decker asked.

  Tess consulted her screen.

  “Heat sinks are good. Not quite up to eighty percent of passive thermal limits yet. We have some breathing room.”

  “Good to know. All hands, prep for arrival and hard dock. I want something strong and cold in front of me without delay. Let’s make sure we’re all buttoned up so the dockmaster doesn’t have cause to give us any shit.”