Cradle of War (A Captain's Crucible Book 3) (11 page)

“No,” the telepath replied. “I don’t believe the aliens can see those paths on their own, not without a human of my abilities. The alien had intended to report back on our future to its higher-ups, no doubt, but I grew too powerful. I lived many lives, you see, and retained all my abilities from one life to the next. I overwhelmed the creature and it died.”

Jonathan found himself losing patience. “That’s quite the good story. But why don’t these aliens use a similar mind link to accelerate their own development? Or to see their own futures?”

“Perhaps they do,” Barrick said. “Or perhaps my link was unique, because I am of a different species. I cannot be sure.”

“All right.” Jonathan grinned mockingly. “So you can see the future. Or different variations of it. Tell me then: what’s going to happen next? Lay out the different paths for me.”

Barrick shook his head. “I tried that. Never helps. In fact, it usually makes matters worse.”

“Try me.”

Barrick sighed. “I’m sorry, Captain. I cannot.”

The two Raakarr guards turned down a side passage, and Jonathan and Barrick followed.

Jonathan glanced at the telepath. “Did you ever bother to think that maybe, just maybe, the alien you linked with was planting false memories of the future into your mind to mislead you?”

“The thought has occurred to me,” Barrick said. “And in fact, I believe it was some subconscious suggestion on the part of the alien that caused my attempted coup of the
Callaway
to fail. I’ve since learned to protect myself, so the Raakarr will never use me like that again. And they’ll never know what I saw. Though Valor asks me at least once a day.”

“Can the Raakarr read these futures from me, too?” Jonathan asked. “Did they read Bridgette?”

“The alien minds can’t initiate a link with a human being,” Barrick said. “So unless you attempt a psychic connection first, you’re safe. Needless to say, while you and Bridgette both have psychic potential, neither of you are capable of such a thing.”

Jonathan wondered if Barrick was wrong. He remembered the visions the Elder embryos had sent him: those things had definitely initiated the link with him, or the Elder had, through them. And if
they
could reach his mind, it didn’t seem like too much of a leap for the Raakarr to do so, too.

He sincerely hoped that wasn’t the case. Either way, he was very glad he had a psi-shielded spacesuit. Then again, back on the greenhouse planet, the embryos had reached Robert
while
the commander was wearing such a suit.

Staring at those claustrophobic alien bulkheads, Jonathan suddenly felt very alone and vulnerable.

S
till wearing his spacesuit, Jonathan stood on the cramped alien bridge. The two Centurions resided on either side of him; Barrick lingered a meter away from the rightmost. Both Centurions were unarmed—the Raakarr had made the robots give up their weapons outside the entry hatch, with a promise to return them on the way out. Jonathan had readily agreed—in his mind the robots were weapons in and of themselves.

He observed his surroundings through the thick yellow mist of the alien atmosphere. The metal bulkheads of the bridge formed a seamless compartment so that Jonathan felt like he stood inside an elongated sphere. There were strange, seemingly decorative hollows in that sphere, matched symmetrically on three sides. Barrick had told him he believed the shape was based on the inside of a Raakarr skull.

A cylindrical pit resided in the center of the compartment, giving the impression that Jonathan occupied an elevated walkway. Six Raakarr, absent their usual darkness generators, sat side by side in the pit, their backs to a thin pillar that climbed to the overhead. Their heads and upper bodies overflowed onto the deck beside them; they appeared to be treating the surrounding floor space as one big armrest. Thanks to the cramped confines, Jonathan was so close to the pit that he could’ve touched the closest alien merely by extending his boot half a meter in front of him.

Clad in the living black of their darkness generators, two Raakarr stood guard by the main entry hatch. Another two bookended Jonathan’s party.

“Which one of them is Valor?” Jonathan asked the telepath over the comm.

“To be honest,” Barrick replied. “I don’t actually know.”

Jonathan stared at the unshielded Raakarr in the pit and tried to guess which one was the captain. They all looked the same to him. No, not quite. There were subtle differences. That one had a slightly smaller head. The horns on another were bigger. The mandibles slightly crooked on a third. Because of those differences he thought Barrick might be lying: perhaps the telepath was trying to protect Valor out of some misguided sense of loyalty. Either way, Jonathan decided not to press the matter.

He continued studying the aliens. Overall, they were vaguely insectile. Those large, spiky forelegs reminded him of a mantis insect. Horned plates lined their segmented abdomens. He couldn’t see their jointed hind legs from his current position, but he assumed they must be folded underneath their bodies in the pit.

The round heads contained bifurcated mandibles on either side of tube-like probosces. Three round protrusions on their crowns could only be eyes, protected by plates that extended from the sides of the head. According to Barrick, members of the Zarafe faction had slightly longer necks, and didn’t naturally possess those eye plates; the sleeper cell members who had commandeered the ship had apparently used gene-therapy to physically modify themselves, allowing them to blend-in with the “Elk” and pass on-board biometric security measures.

If these aliens were truly descended from the Elder, they couldn’t look that much different from their ancestors, even if they employed an accelerant to increase mutation rates as Barrick claimed. Only six to eight hundred thousand years would have passed since they branched off from the main species—assuming that was when the Elder left the galaxy.

After all, humans looked much the same as their own ancestors of eight hundred thousand years ago. Modern humans stood taller and had a slightly larger brain case, the product of an environment that selected for size and intelligence—ancient man didn’t have much leeway for stupidity.

Jonathan often wondered if humanity had come full circle, with the overall intelligence of human beings on the decline; many a Darwinist had argued that mental capacity was no longer an attribute selected against, nor had been for several hundred years thanks to all the comforts and automation of the modern era. Indeed, Jonathan was questioning his own intelligence at the moment: he had chosen to leave behind a perfectly good ship to board an alien vessel, after all.

Once again he wondered if he should have listened to Robert and stayed with the rest of the fleet.

Too late, now.

“It’s almost like our own Round Table,” Barrick said over the comm. “Except in reverse.”

“What’s that?” Jonathan answered, roused from his thoughts.

“The way they’re sitting,” Barrick answered. “It’s like our Round Table, except they’re seated back to back. Their minds are linked of course, so that when the captain wishes to issue a command, he need merely think it to the individual in question.”

“How does he communicate with the AI?” Jonathan asked. “Assuming there is an AI...”

“Oh there is,” Barrick replied. He nodded toward one of the indentations in the bulkhead. “See that sensor? They wear matching devices on their heads. I’m guessing that’s how they communicate with the AI.”

Jonathan stared at the indentation and finally spotted a small, dark disk set against the lighter metal of the backdrop. He glanced at the symmetrical opposites of the indentation in the compartment, and noted two more such disks.

“You’ll never guess how they eat,” Barrick said.

Jonathan glanced at Barrick and stated, slightly deadpan: “How do they eat.”

“You see those corrugated lines all along their bellies? I’ve figured out that’s their digestive tract. It’s completely external. Before they go to sleep, they slather their bodies with some kind of goo, which I think is their food. And most of it is absorbed by morning. They shake off the dried flakes that remain when they wake up. Their equivalent of taking a shit.”

“Thanks for that,” Jonathan said. “I’ll be sure to share it with our scientists.”

“I think they’ll appreciate it,” Barrick said.

Because I sure don’t
, Jonathan thought. He noticed something. “Wait. If they digest food externally, what’s the point of the probosces on their heads?”

“Those are for sexual reproduction,” Barrick said.

Jonathan gave him a disbelieving look. “Are you sure you’re not making all of this up?”

“Maybe some of it,” Barrick admitted.

Jonathan shook his head. “Damn it.”

“I feel sorry for you, Captain,” Robert’s voice came over from the
Callaway
on a private line that excluded Barrick. “I’d hate to spend even a few minutes, let alone a few weeks, cooped up with that telepath.”

Though the range to the
Callaway
wasn’t far, and the human comm nodes in the hangar bay boosted the signal, the commander’s voice suffered from severe digital warping—if the
Talon’s
bridge was anything like his own cruiser, there would be extra armor and radiation shielding around the compartment. Without HLEDs to retransmit the data via Li-Fi, the packet loss would be relatively high.

“I’ll manage,” Jonathan replied to his first officer.

He ran his gaze once more across the compartment. It was still hard to make the connection that he was actually on the bridge of a starship. The aliens manning the place didn’t help: he felt like he stood in some illegal menagerie, where he observed genetic freaks put together by academy scientists with too much time on their hands looking to justify the expense of their department’s DNA printers.

Also, he was used to having a wealth of information overlaid onto his vision: the 3D tactical display showing the battle space immediately surrounding the starship, the external video feeds that provided images in the visual, thermal, and other radiation bands. He could still have them if he really wanted, lagged as the streams would be, but he had turned them off to preserve bandwidth for the live digital video transmission he was sending Robert.

The commander’s voice came on the line again. “I’m still surprised they let you transmit video from their bridge. Not that I’m complaining.”

“They’re going to have to share what their bridge looks like at some point,” Jonathan said over the private line, excluding Barrick. “When we assign them a real liaison officer, for example. That the Raakarr are doing it now shows me they’re somewhat serious about an alliance. How’s my video feed by the way? Still pixelating?”

“As ever,” came the commander’s reply a few seconds later. “We tried compensating for it, but they certainly have some powerful shielding in place around that bridge. Though that armor makes me wonder... you claim they’re giving you permission to send video, and that it shows how serious they are about an alliance? Have you considered that maybe they thought we wouldn’t be able to punch through it at all?”

“I’m sure their AI would have pointed that out to them by now,” Jonathan replied. “And they haven’t made me shut it off.”

“Maybe,” Robert said. “By the way, we finished the full sweep of the
Callaway
you requested earlier. And the remaining ships in the fleet have completed similar internal searches.”

“And...?” Jonathan replied.

“If the Phant is aboard any of our vessels, then the thing has found a way to evade our scans,” Robert responded a moment later. “There’s no sign of it anywhere. Should I be worried?”

Jonathan glanced at the telepath. “No. It was a false alarm, I think.”

Barrick spoke over the main comm a moment later. “Otter tells me the
Talon
is nearing the Slipstream.” Otter was the liaison officer that Valor had assigned to them so that the telepath wouldn’t have to “constantly pester Valor,” as Barrick put it. He had come up with the name on his own, because when Barrick asked the alien what he should call it, the creature apparently returned a point cloud that vaguely resembled an otter.

“How long until we cross over into our own galaxy?” Jonathan asked the man.

“They’re launching exploratory probes now,” Barrick said. “We’ll leave as soon as they get back.”

Several minutes passed.

Barrick spoke again. “Otter says the probes have returned. Apparently the space beyond definitely corresponds to Vega 951. However, there were two Raakarr comm node equivalents camped out beside the entrance. They have been disabled by an EMP from the probes, and the area is now clear.”

Jonathan felt his brow crumple. “I thought you said the
Talon
launched ‘exploratory’ probes.”

“Well, they are. An EMP is the only offensive measure the probes are capable of.”

“Fine,” Jonathan said. “Are there any indications of other ships nearby? Raakarr or human?”

“None.”

Robert’s voice came over the comm. “The Raakarr have to be hiding somewhere in the system.”

“I agree,” Jonathan said over the private line. “As I doubt they could have reached the farther Slipstream, 2-Vega, by now. I’m sure they’ll show themselves soon—when they realize their comm nodes have been disabled.”

“Your arrival will probably catch them by surprise,” Robert added. “I highly doubt they were expecting any of us so soon.”

“I hope so.”

“The probes have docked,” Barrick announced. “The
Talon
is accelerating toward the Slipstream.”

Jonathan felt his heart rate increase.

“This is it, Robert,” he said through the lagging connection to the
Callaway
. “Anything you want to say before I jump a few million light years away?”

“Only one thing, Captain,” Robert replied. “Give them hell.”

Jonathan laughed softly. “I expect you to return my ship without a scratch on her.”

“I don’t know about that,” Robert said. “Micro-meteor accumulations can cause quite a mess on the Whittle layer, as I’m sure you know.”

Jonathan chuckled once more. “Micro-meteor accumulations are the least of my worries.” He blinked several times and added: “I leave the ship in good hands.”

Robert replied a few seconds later. “Maxwell says he’ll burn some toast in your honor. I have no idea what that means.”

“Tell Maxwell—”

Robert’s connection indicator abruptly winked out.

“We’re through,” Barrick said.

Good-bye, Commander. And good luck.