Rogue Orbit

  The Ghost Fleet: Book Four

  Joshua Guess

  ©2018 Joshua Guess

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Rogue Orbit

  Prologue

  1 | Six months later

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  Epilogue One | Grant

  Epilogue Two | Ness’ai

  Epilogue Three | Child Blue/Child Blue

  For Lisa

  For your support and friendship

  Prologue

  In the weeks following the end of the war with his species, Child Blue had changed. The Children, vast artificial intelligences housed in bodyships the size of cities, were defeated. Those who chose to abandon the war with humanity were gone, now far across the galaxy and the last survivors of their race.

  Excepting Blue himself, of course.

  His kind had never had a need for most of the odd customs that came with human—or more broadly, biological—society. Among the Children there was no gender. Every one of them could choose to reproduce at any time simply by constructing a core and programming a mind based on their own within it. Blue had never done so, but the fundamental creativity of the act appealed to him.

  It was not to be. Blue was the last remaining member of his species within human-controlled space, choosing to remain behind for a variety of reasons. He had chosen to present himself as male through the remote avatars he used to communicate with the Alliance as a visual signal that he would make no more Children. With luck, the others of his kind would keep their word and never return, perhaps even taking a few decades to reconfigure themselves for the long trek to another galaxy.

  Though the choice was made for the benefit of others, Blue found himself thinking in human terms. His mind was as malleable as any organic creature, and as the weeks stretched on he began to internalize the idea of himself as he.

  We are, after all, the stories we tell about ourselves. Blue was no different.

  The absence of his brethren did not leave him without purpose. The Alliance, however distrustful of Blue they might be, needed his help. Those Children who chose to attack rather than leave had been obliterated, but not before wreaking unspeakable damage on more than a dozen star systems. That was in addition to the hundreds of ships, naval and civilian, destroyed across the Alliance during the frenzied defense.

  Blue had given them his technology, from the Slip drive to the advanced weapons systems the Children had been in the process of implementing when the end of the war finally came. Part of his immense consciousness was always working on the problems now plaguing the civilization crippled by his species. The Alliance could feed its people, but beyond that there were disruptions in every aspect of their society. Blue sent out a constant stream of solutions to help them, from improving the efficiency of Alliance fabrication systems to speed up the production of new spacecraft, to working out entire new classes of medications to treat the illnesses unleashed by the Children on so many ravaged worlds.

  Yet this was not his mission.

  Blue’s only restriction was that he had to remain within the thousand light year stretch which marked the boundary of the Alliance. Given how unimaginably vast a territory that was, he found it easy enough to work within that limit. Blue was one of two defensive measures intended to deter any Children who might get ideas about coming back for vengeance, after all. Ethically he could not leave. This was his mission, his purpose. The government of the Planetary Alliance interpreted this fact narrowly, content with his presence within their borders and whatever help he chose to provide.

  Blue took a far more broad view, and it was within the first month of the attack that he cracked one of the longest standing mysteries held close by the Originators—his creators. It would have been impossible without the blind luck in recovering the partially melted bodyship of one of them, the lone Originator to escape complete disintegration by Alliance forces in their final assault. The monstrous bodyship was found adrift at the edge of the solar system it had been hiding in, its core nonfunctional but its peripheral neural networking nodes and storage intact enough to be studied.

  When Blue finally broke through the layers of protection draped over the data like armor, he calculated a jump through the Cascade and aimed for Athena station. Headquarters of the Alliance military.

  “What do you mean, you’ve discovered the source of your technology?” Admiral Goff asked, incredulity written on her face.

  Blue’s avatar stood in her office on Athena station with Fiona, the sim currently assigned as his liaison, next to him. Goff had no sim of her own, which would have been an oddity for someone as powerful as the woman with the iron-gray hair if not for the critical role the sims played in stopping the war. By unilaterally choosing to hold the Alliance military hostage as part of the bargain to get the rebel Children to withdraw, the artificial people created by the Navy had instantly become objects of suspicion. At least by those in charge of the military.

  Blue’s avatar was based on sim technology. Though little more than a puppet rather than fully autonomous as they were, in all other regards they were nearly indistinguishable. Blue and Fiona both passed as human beings right down to smells and body heat. Her features were Afro-Asian with a mass of dark curls, while his were neutrally Indo-European by design. Blue preferred to be blandly unremarkable when operating his sim avatar. Every aspect of the body was calculated to be average for someone from one of the larger colony planets.

  “I am unsure where I lost you,” Blue said, titling his head in bafflement.

  To her credit, Goff did not lose her temper. Few people rose to the heights of running intelligence divisions such as the NIA without a respectable level of self-control. “What I mean is that I don’t understand what you’re saying. You’re telling me you don’t know where your own technology comes from? I thought your Originators were the source.”

  “Ah, I see,” Blue said. “No. Not for all of it. When my creators escaped Jefferson, they worked for years to perfect some aspects of Alliance technology. Fabrication, advanced neural networks, that sort of thing. But every one of their Children understood that certain elements of our technology were not only far beyond anything the Alliance would have been able to create within a few centuries, but sometimes without precedent. The coating our bodyships use to soak up energy, for example. The chemical processes and theory needed to manufacture it are completely without links to your civilization.”

  Fiona gestured with one hand. “It would be like a society with steam technology suddenly stumbling across fusion. There is no frame of reference within the first for the second.”

  Goff nodded, now interested. Blue saw the first sparks of hunger in her eyes, possibly even greed. These sorts of discoveries were part of what the NIA existed for, after all. Presenting a cache of new technology to her superiors could only cause her stock to rise. “How soon can you have it ready? We should get our people working on it as soon as possible. God knows we need to score a win.”

  Unlike sims, Blue was not constrained by built-in human reactions. The concept of awkwardness was beyond his capacity to experience, though his constant interactions with people had begun to teach him when feeling such things would be appropriate. “I have discovered the source, not the technology itself. What I have given the Alliance is what I have. I believe there is more at the source. Which is a planet. One that will be exceptionally dangerous to approach. In all likelihood, even trying will turn out to be a suicide mission. The Originators protected it well, and those protections would not have shut down upon their deaths.”

  Goff’s nascent good mood withered and died, her face going stonily thoughtful. After a few seconds of thought, she steepled her fingers together. “Well. If that’s the case, I think I have just the crew. We’ll have you brief them and set up a training regimen so they have a chance of getting through. They might even do it. That bunch has a knack for pulling through when they should have died.”

  Blue was not human, but neither was he naïve. Goff’s personal animosity toward the sim who had taken it upon herself to save the human race by threatening to shut down its military was widely known. Blue had a special connection with that sim, and by extension her crew.

  It was not lost on him that he might have just accidentally signed their death warrants. Back in the vast complexes of neural circuitry webbed through his bodyship, Blue added a series of new problems to be solved. If he put them in danger, it was his responsibility to do everything he could to keep Grant Stone and his crew alive.

  1

  Six months later

  Grant took the kick to his midsection and rolled with it far more gracefully than he would have before this nightmare began. The thin but sturdy armor of his sparring gear stiffened upon impact, the n
on-Newtonian metal sandwiched between rugged layers of polymer absorbing the kinetic energy as it always did.

  He staggered back and swatted at the foot but his reactions were too slow. His attacker had already danced to one side.

  “Gotta be quicker than that,” Crash said with a grin.

  Grant chose not to reply, instead darting forward and getting in close, distracting his first officer with a flurry of jabs. The surprise on her face was deeply satisfying, though she blocked and evaded with laughable ease.

  “Didn’t see that coming,” she noted. “You’re changing up your style. Nice.”

  Grant redoubled his efforts, falling into what he thought of as a harmony with himself. There was no other way to describe it. His motions felt perfectly in tune with his body and mind, a state easier to reach after months of nonstop training. His reward was seeing Crash actually have to put some effort into warding him off.

  Then he saw an opening and for the first time since they’d been sequestered and forced to train like naval recon operatives, he thought he had her.

  Grant was wrong.

  She closed the trap flawlessly, snagging his wrist and spinning on her center axis to overbalance him. The part that really hurt his pride—every damn time—was that the throws were never brutal. They looked easy from the outside. All it took was the right amount of force added to his movement and suddenly he was on his face.

  This time was no exception. Grant smacked into the mat with a groan, his fancy armor doing nothing to soften the impact of his cheek with the foam covering the floor.

  “Let’s call it a day,” a booming voice said from the far end of the room. “And since this is your final CQC session, we can also call it a wrap. Well done, everyone.”

  The voice belonged to another of Grant’s subordinates, Jessica Hayes. Before joining the Ghost Fleet, the secret intelligence apparatus run by the Alliance Navy and composed of civilian vessels used as combat and information gathering assets, she’d actually been one of those recon operatives. Which was why she was allowed to take command of the training for Grant’s crew.

  He hauled himself to his feet and began stripping off the armor. Crash gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder as they made their way to the showers.

  They were nearly ready after months of being stuck on a base not much bigger than a heavy frigate on a moon orbiting a gas giant in a system not listed on any star map. The NIA built the place years ago specifically to act as a black site where Ghost Fleet agents could receive specialized training for especially hairy missions, according to Commander Sharp, the NIA officer in charge of the fleet.

  No, formerly in charge, Grant reminded himself. He hadn’t been demoted after the end of the war. No one would have stood for that. Instead that admiral was put above him, an overseer whose entire job was to rein in the increasingly erratic actions of the fleet itself. As the captain of a ship, Grant could understand the move on a purely intellectual level. The Ghost Fleet had always been a tenuously balanced command, with a thousand ships and their crews forced to improvise constantly within the boundaries of their missions. It made sense to put more control in place.

  As a member of that fleet, however, Grant was fucking furious.

  Two months into their downtime after the end of the war, they’d been ordered to this hole. The particulars of the mission he and the crew were preparing for had ‘need to know’ stamped across them. He’d joined the Ghost Fleet reluctantly, and mostly to avoid this exact situation. Being forced into seclusion and trained to infiltrate, fight, and destroy targets was not what he’d signed up for.

  “Three more days,” Crash said as they reached the small divided vestibule where they could shower and change. “Think they’ll even bother telling us what we’re going to do, or just send us in blind?”

  “You joke, but at this point I wouldn’t put it past Goff,” Grant said. “They’ve given us almost nothing.”

  He saw Crash shake her head over the tall divider between them. She stepped into the shower alcove after shucking out of her gear, causing the stream to activate. “Not true. We know a lot of what we’re going to be dealing with just based on what we’ve had to train for. Say that much for Goff. She must want us to succeed.”

  Grant had his doubts about that, personally, even if he didn’t share them aloud. Better to let the crew believe Goff ultimately cared enough about the mission not to kill them all for what sure looked like petty revenge to him. The training had been thorough, however, and Crash wasn’t entirely off base. Much of the work they’d done over the last few months was based around taking control of assets and holding them. It was stressed at every turn that this was not meant to be the sort of scorched earth mission they were used to.

  Which would have been just fine but for the fact that no one would share even the tiniest detail about their objectives. Grant hated going into any mission blind. The more you knew, the safer you were.

  And on that count, he was once again wrong.

  When the briefing came, Sharp himself delivered it. As usual the man didn’t mince words.

  “In one week you’ll leave here for coordinates that will be programmed into the local gate,” the older man said to the gathered crew. “Once you’ve entered the Cascade, your mission parameters will be fully decrypted. I’ve been...instructed to give you an overview.”

  Though Grant kept his own face impassive, he felt the same shock the rest of the crew openly displayed. Dex and Iona sat near Crash, the three of them exchanging meaningful looks as if the others couldn’t see what was obvious. Lieutenant Fen huddled with Hayes, Batta, and Spencer. The three newest crewmen, all combat troops under Fen’s command, took the news better than the others. Jemison, King, and Jordan signed on just before they’d been ordered here. To Grant’s enduring surprise, they chose to remain when given the chance to void their contracts.

  “You don’t want us to know where we are when we get there,” Grant said in a flat tone. “We’re doing a blind jump. How the hell are we supposed to get home, exactly?”

  Sharp pursed his lips. “I don’t want that, Captain. Let’s be crystal clear on that subject. This is over my head. I fought hard against this course of action. The best I could do was to work with another party to make sure you were as prepared as possible. And yes, you’re blind jumping. Once you’re through the gate, we’ll be sending in a set of pylons to establish a gate in the sector you’ll be working in. You can trigger them for a return trip after a set amount of time.”

  “Which will be in the file we can only see after the mission starts,” Spencer chimed in. “So we could be stuck there for a year before we can come home.”

  Sharp shook his head, a curt motion. “No. Not anything close to that long. As for the mission itself, the reason you can’t know its location is simple. It’s a potential category three alien civilization.”

  The room went silent as a funeral as everyone in the space probably assume as Grant did that they’d misheard.

  “You’re fucking kidding,” Grant said.

  “I’m really fucking not,” Sharp assured him with the barest hint of a smile. “We don’t believe it’s an active civilization for reasons that will become clear. It’s located on a rogue planet with a very slow orbit.”

  A rogue. Well, that was interesting. Planets ejected from their system of origin were uncommon, and without the life giving warmth and energy of a parent star, anything living should have died there long before it could reach beyond early evolution.

  Of course it was always possible whatever species left its mark there did so after migrating to the place. Humanity was a category one civilization, bordering on two. The definitions were all about colonization and technology. Cat one societies had mastered interstellar travel and could manipulate at least one of the fundamental forces. In humanity’s case, and that of every alien civilization Grant knew about, that force was gravity. A cat two society had a few more technological hurdles to leap, like altering biology at will. Humanity wasn’t far off from that one. But as far as Grant knew, they were nowhere near mastering even the theory needed to control any of the other fundamental forces or constants. Being able to manipulate the strong or weak nuclear forces, alter mass, or change the rules of electromagnetism were always talked about but never achieved.