Unbroken Faith

Chapter 1

LKI-598 System
18:00 January 8, 2740 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time

The problem with opportunistic pirates, in Vice Admiral Anthony Yamamoto’s unfortunately considered and experienced opinion, was that because they were opportunistic, they wanted to be able to go back to regular trade afterward.

Which meant that, as a rule, they left no survivors.

The fighter pilot turned fighter group commander now turned task group commander—and he wasn’t sure he’d ever forgive his boss for that—stood in what had been the crew gymnasium of the mining ship Penelope’s Fault.

Fault was a permanent resident of the LKI-598 System, an uninhabited and uninhabitable waypoint star on the edge of the Dakotan Confederacy. Most of her crew had cycled in and out about every six months, according to the files they had, when a big interstellar transport came through to pick up the results of their labor.

A lot of people, including Penelope’s Fault’s owners, had made a great deal of money from the mining ship. Unfortunately, now, all four hundred and ninety-odd members of her crew were dead. The Dakotan Confederacy Marines who’d boarded ahead of Yamamoto weren’t even sure how many people had been herded into the gymnasium before the pirates had opened fire with machine guns.

“Any sign of survivors at all?” Anthony asked flatly. His voice was tense, which always turned his accent even more Scottish. The tall Japanese man certainly looked like his famous ancestor, but he’d been born and raised in Scotland on Earth.

A planet now a hundred–plus light-years away and, unfortunately, a mortal enemy to his new nation.

Life was funny like that. Not that he was finding much funny today.

“We restored atmosphere before we brought you aboard, sir,” Major Omiros Iordanou told him. “There was no air aboard… for at least a month.”

The big Kretan officer was wearing full-body powered combat armor. So was everybody else in the charnel house that had been a gymnasium, except for Anthony, who wore a standard shipsuit. Which functioned as an emergency space suit, so he wasn’t in any danger.

He wasn’t the only non-Marine aboard the ship, either. They’d brought several dozen computer and forensic specialists over from the Dakotan Confederacy Navy carrier Saratoga, all under the careful watch of the carrier’s starfighters and the battlecruiser Iroquois.

But he’d needed to see just how bad it was with his own eyes.

“Computer specialists are tearing into the systems as we speak,” Iordanou continued. “We should know as much as possible about Penelope’s Fault’s killers before we leave the system.”

“What I want to know, right now, is where are they?” Anthony said grimly. “And I suspect I’m going to be sadly disappointed on that front.”

He took one last look around the massacre, then grimaced and strode out of the gymnasium. Iordanou followed.

“Our best option is probably to send the ship into the damn star,” Anthony told the Marine. “Give these poor bastards all the sendoff we can manage.”

“I don’t expect to find much in the computers,” his subordinate replied. “On the other hand, every time I poke at just what the hell our pirates would have been doing in LKI in the first place, I get all hopeful that they might come back.”

“The problem is that after two years, we know Brillig is a goddamn mess,” Anthony pointed out. The Brillig Sector, like the Dakota Sector and the Meridian Sector, had once been a six-inhabited-star-system subdivision of the Terran Commonwealth.

Dakota and Meridian had survived the collapse of the Commonwealth’s communication networks over two years earlier by allying and forging the Dakotan Confederacy. Brillig had disintegrated into anarchy on an interstellar level. The sector fleet had broken up, and the star systems had stopped talking to each other by any method.

It was starting to return to a semblance of calm, but Brillig would forever be four independent systems and a two-system problem, not a multistellar government. Not unless one of the expansionist Successor States scooped them up, anyway—and everyone else who shared borders with them seemed to think that aggravating the second-largest of said Successor States was a bad idea.

The Dakotan Confederacy wasn’t going to conquer the former Brillig Sector themselves, but one star had joined the Confederacy—and Dakota had the ships, Marines and diplomats to make anyone else think real hard about looking greedily at the Sector. Especially now that every star system in it was back on the interstellar communication network via Dakota’s q-com switchboard.

“And if you were swinging back and forth between, say, Brillig, Blyton, and a couple of our stars, LKI-Five-Nine-Eight would be a good place to stop and catch up in safety,” Iordanou observed. “Not a great plan, as I understand it, but a place to hide away from prying eyes can be more useful than a faster trip, I imagine.”

“Sometimes,” Anthony conceded. “I’m going to check out the computer center and see what the analysts have found.” He tapped the side of his head, a universal indicator of the neural implants they all had in their skulls.

“I’m keeping my ears open; let me know if we find anything.”

 

#

 

Penelope’s Fault was smaller than any interstellar ship, but that wasn’t saying much. The Class One mass manipulators needed to create the Alcubierre-Stetson FTL drive cost a measurable percentage of a star system’s GDP each, and a starship needed a minimum of four.

No one built starships smaller than “the largest they could.” That metric changed over time—the two ships in Anthony’s task group had both been the largest available when built, but Saratoga was “merely” eight hundred meters long and forty million cubic meters or so… while Iroquois was over seventeen hundred meters long, with a volume of over eighty million cubic meters and a mass of over twenty-five million tons.

Fault was an oblong brick just over half a kilometer long and about two-thirds of that thick. Her sublight engines were crap, but she wasn’t intended to be much more than a somewhat mobile base for the extractor ships that were tearing through LKI-598’s asteroid belts.

There was plenty of space for the several hundred Dakotan Confederacy Marines and Dakotan Confederacy Navy specialists to vanish into the dark and foreboding corridors. The Marines had restored atmosphere, but gravity was still only present in key areas.

Gravity systems were fragile at the best of times and didn’t handle being abandoned for an unknown number of months without maintenance or operation particularly well. Plus, the mass manipulators and exotic-matter coils that underlay any gravity system were the highest-density value items aboard a sublight ship like Penelope’s Fault.

Most of them were probably gone.

Still, as Anthony approached the mining ship’s main computer center, his implant told him that there was a gravity field present. His shipsuit was automatically adjusting his boots to allow for the seventy percent of a gravity that an emergency generator was putting out—and his neural implant threw up both the location of said generator and of the heavy-weapons team covering the entrance to the center.

The Marines were finding the dead spaceship as unfortunate as he was. A pair of the armored soldiers was following him everywhere, which he figured was reasonable there!

The woman in charge of the guard detail saluted as he approached, metal clinking softly as her gauntlet touched her helmet.

“Admiral, computer center is secure,” she reported. “We’ve got a portable power source and a bunch of specialists bringing the systems online and poking through them.” She paused. “Your pet Crow is here, too.”

Anthony did not quite roll his eyes at that.

“Agent Rogers is not anyone’s pet, Sergeant,” he observed. “But I’m glad they’re here. Their skills will come in handy.”

“Of course, they will, sir,” the Marine confirmed. “Should I clear you in?”

“Please.” He smiled. “Do you need to see my identification?”

A notification in his head told him she had done the network equivalent of just that a moment later, checking his implant ID codes against the implants and codes that Vice Admiral Anthony Yamamoto, Dakotan Confederacy Starfighter Corps, should have.

“You’re clear, sir.”

The multi-barreled heavy penetrator cannon hadn’t been pointed at him at all, but its crew ever-so-subtly moved the heavy weapon to point away from him at that declaration.

Anthony nodded his approval to the Marines and strode forward, letting the Sergeant open the door for him with only moments to spare.

The computer center was the first place he’d been aboard Penelope’s Fault that had full lights. They probably could have put the lights on full in the gymnasium, but Anthony rather appreciated that they hadn’t.

If there had been any massacred innocents in the computer center, they’d been removed before he got there.

Instead, the bright lights shone down on dozens of semi-crystalline towers of molecular-circuitry computer cores. There were particular patterns and shapes to the cores that told even Anthony, whose interest in technology normally began and ended with starfighters, that those cores were old. Probably obsolete and, if nothing else, very, very cheap.

Two dozen Navy techs in their maroon-edged black uniforms were swarming over the systems. Most of the cores appeared to be online, but no one was using Fault’s own systems to access them. Several mobile computing setups had been linked in to act as relays, but as Anthony walked into the organized chaos, he could tell that most of the work was happening in his people’s implants.

He wore the same duty uniform as the techs, but where they had maroon lapels on their jackets and piping on their shipsuits, his uniform had the dark indigo blue of the Starfighter Corps. The colors were part of the small but clear changes made when the Dakotan Confederacy military moved away from using Terran Commonwealth uniforms.

Still, over half of their personnel had served in the Commonwealth’s military, but the failure of interstellar communications and a few political issues had led to the Confederacy’s independence… almost two years ago that day, in fact.

The odd person out in the mix saw Anthony and walked over to him as the Admiral approached. Unlike everyone else, Agent Jessie Rogers didn’t salute. They were, theoretically, civilian—though the Dakotan Confederacy Reconnaissance Organization was arguably paramilitary and certainly worked with the Navy.

Rogers’ uniform had no piping at all. The only sign of any department was the lapel insignia they wore—where the Marines wore a coyote, the Navy wore a dolphin and the Starfighter Corps wore an eagle, the DCRO agent wore a silver crow.

Anthony figured the nickname might have been inevitable, but he had to admit that the Confederacy’s new intelligence agency had definitely courted it. For their part, Rogers was even taller than Anthony, dark-haired, with a beak of a nose and pale skin that might have led to crow comparisons anyway.

“Admiral,” they greeted him. “Looking for more nightmares?”

“My stopover in the gymnasium guaranteed those,” Anthony said grimly. “Tell me you have something. Or that you will.” He made a gesture encompassing the entire room. “I recognize that this isn’t a fast process.”

“Penelope’s Fault isn’t a warship, Admiral,” Rogers pointed out. “Step this way.”

Anthony followed the Crow, his Marines trailing him by a discreet few steps.

“The Navy folks are still poking through details and running full analyses, but they have a process to follow,” Rogers told him. It wasn’t a criticism, Anthony had to note. Just a statement. “I don’t. I have an objective.”

“Please tell me that objective was finding the assholes that did this.”

“Oh, it very fucking much was,” the Crow told him. “And while I don’t have any promises, Admiral, I know a lot more about what happened here and our potential opportunities than I was afraid I would.”

Even through the sealed pane of the spy’s shipsuit helmet, Anthony could see a smile that definitely belonged on a carrion bird.

“What did you find?” he asked.

“Somebody on Fault’s crew was a paranoid, paranoid, paranoid bugger,” Rogers observed. “If I thought they’d survived, I’d be organizing a queue to give them great big thank-you kisses.”

“Agent.”

Rogers chuckled.

“They had a secondary sensor cluster set up, running a completely separate set of hardware, software, everything,” they told Anthony. “And while I’m sure some of the engineers had to know where it was, the pirates didn’t. So, when they fucked up all of the sensors and did a purge of the files, they missed everything on what was probably meant as an audit trail.”

“Do we know who they are?” Anthony demanded.

Rogers made a gesture and a three-dimensional image transferred to the Admiral’s implant.

“Great Chicago Fire,” the Crow told him. “Fifty-five million cubic meters, big ass motherfucking transport that does a round-robin loop between what was the Brillig and Dakota Sectors.

“They’ve been doing this run for almost twenty years. Fire was probably one of the first civilian fifty-fives ever built. She’s been through a few crews, a few captains, but her route hasn’t changed much. Not even when the Alliance fucked our coms.”

“But she’s big enough to give a lot of people a damn headache if she gets opportunistic,” Anthony guessed grimly.

“Digging into the records we have from Before, she’s got expanded shuttle capacity and a quite-capable anti-meteorite-impact system,” Rogers pointed out. “Latter, at least officially, is all popgun lasers… but let’s be fair: popgun lasers can fuck up a merchant ship pretty handily, and it’s not hard to reconfigure shuttle-handling gear to handle starfighters, is it?”

“No.” Anthony expanded the imagery with a thought. “Do we know what she’s been up to the last two years?”

“On paper, the same damn thing she was doing before. A lot of ships with these regular routes stayed on them, just getting more cautious. Seems Great Chicago Fire, though, was part of the reason everyone was getting more cautious.

“Mapping her against known pirate issues definitely pops a few positives. Nothing solid enough that I’d even flag her for investigation, but given that I now have detailed sensor footage of her launching two dozen old Scimitar-type starfighters and a flotilla of assault shuttles at a ship where everyone turned up dead… Well, I don’t need to flag her for investigation, do I?”

“Fuckers.”

Rogers was a spy and, ultimately, had no law enforcement authority. The DCRO was allowed to run counterintelligence operations inside the Confederacy on very strict rules—and among those rules was that the final call for a lot of things came down to planetary law enforcement.

Anthony Yamamoto, on the other hand, was a task group commander in the Dakotan Confederacy Navy—even if he was a Starfighter Corps officer—and that gave him some rather significant law enforcement authority, especially when it came to piracy.

“So, where are our Chicagoan friends now?” He looked around the room and swallowed a spike of anger. “For that matter, do we know when this happened?”

“Seven months ago,” Rogers said instantly. They coughed delicately. “The Crows may have arranged for your patrol to get updated to include LKI after Fault’s owners raised the question of having lost their ship.”

“We’ll talk about why that’s a terrible idea later,” Anthony said warningly. “But we’re here and we found them. So, now we find Great Chicago Fire.”

“So, one of the advantages of an audit-trail sensor package like this one is that it just… keeps running,” Rogers told him. “Which means we have sensor data up to about six weeks ago, when the backup power finally failed. Combining that with the records from back home on Fire’s course, I think she’s headed back into Confederacy space about now.

“I think she’s using this system as a stopover point, a place to go through their loot and consider their next steps,” the spy continued. “And if all of that adds up, I believe we may be about to get lucky.”

Anthony gave the agent another repressive look.

“Jessie?” he asked.

“I figure we’ve got a fifty-fifty chance the bastards are going to show up here in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, Admiral.”

That was better than Anthony had dared hope for.

“Keep on those computers with my people,” he ordered Rogers. “If we might have guests, I should get back to Iroquois. Because with the evidence you’ve just said we have, if they come visiting… they are not leaving.”