Admiral Invincible (A Spineward Sectors Novel: Book 7) Read online

  I nodded sharply, decisively before softening my approach, consciously switching topics away from this highly charged and recently dealt with topic.

  “Eastwood is right,” I said abruptly, causing all eyes to switch back to me and the Flagship’s First Officer. “We have no battleships, and too few smaller ships to make up the difference,” the pleasant expression I had worn up until that moment congealed into a cold hard smile. “At least, in their eyes; I know that any one of our ships is worth two of these System Defense Forces ships of comparable weight and class, but they don’t. They haven’t got a clue as to what the Multi-Sector Patrol Fleet is all about.”

  Of course, one reason for that was they were far away from where we’d been in action, Sector 25. The other reason was that not even its Admiral—me—had a firm idea of what exactly the MSP was all about. However, one thing we were certainly all about was saving innocent lives.

  Resolved, I looked over at Akantha and her Lancer Captains, and then shook my head.

  “The other thing we’re short of is personnel,” I said regretfully. “This Strike Cruiser has 2400 crew and only 600 Lancers. Just under half the entire manpower of this Fleet is tied up in the Flagship, and something like 35% of our manpower is worse than green. They’re essentially untrained. That means that one Battleship the size of the Clover has double the crew that we have in this entire fleet. However,” I paused to rake the room with a steely determined gaze, “we shall overcome. Reinforcements are on the way and I have a plan to even up the odds when we finally meet back up with the droids.”

  Technically I was stretching the truth, as I didn’t have a plan to even up the odds just yet. But I did have several irons in the fire in an effort to bring something to the table. The one thing I was resolved to, was that one way or the other, by hook or by crook, this Fleet was going to come out of this war stronger than when it started.

  I turned to Akantha and her Captain. “Lancers, I need options. How are we going to deal with these droids if it gets down to hand-to-hand?” I said.

  “We have plans on how to best these metal demons,” Akantha said, turning and looking at Captain Darius.

  The Lyconese Tracto-an nodded and cleared his throat.

  “Normally we carry vibro-blades and blaster rifles. We will keep the blades,” he said firmly, and I had to suppress the urge to roll my eyes. Getting the pig-stickers out of the hands of our barbarian warriors would be like pulling teeth without anesthesia: it would take lots of hard work and the caterwauling while you tried would be deafening. “We plan to use Ion Cannons and Ion grenades to temporarily stun the machines. While metal men are confused, we will close to grips and tear them apart.”

  I blinked at the calm certainty in the Lancer Captains voice and then shrugged it off.

  “We are after having many extra ion grenades,” boomed the voice of Glue the Sundered leader of the three corvettes and remaining gunboats his people had donated to the cause. “You are needing more, we have to spare.”

  Captain Atticus, the other Tracto-an Lancer in the room, was shaking his head but Akantha nodded to the Sundered male, and the Captain settled back in his chair with an unhappy semi-mutinous look. Clearly, someone was not happy to be sharing weapons with the gorilla-people, even if he was on the receiving end. Too much pride to accept a handout? I wondered.

  “I’m workin’ on a couple projects that might help,” Chief Engineer Terrence Spalding said.

  My ears perked up and I looked over toward the old engineer. As usual, his red, cybernetic eye and off-color synthetic skin on his scalp above the eyebrows was disconcerting, but all that quickly faded as he continued to speak.

  “I’ve got an old Penetrator class assault lander and—” Spalding started, only to be cut off.

  “The Penetrator Class was discontinued for a reason,” the Phoenix’s Chief Engineer, the younger Spalding, snapped derisively. “And I happen to know for a fact that you haven’t done so much as a test run with that old shuttle. Whatever it is you’re putt-putting around with down there, it isn’t more than half done.”

  “Why, you impertinent whelp,” growled the old Engineer. “If I say it’s almost ready, then by the blazes she’s almost ready! You might have known that for yourself if you’d bothered to come down and take a look.”

  “I don’t need to come and look at antiques when I’ve got a set of internal sensors which, when properly tuned—as I’ve finally ensured they are—can pick up any strong readings from inside the ship. Readings such as so, oh, I don’t know, a drive signature,” the younger Engineer snorted. “Old man, you haven’t even properly tuned up the grav-plates yet!”

  “Listen here, boy—” Spalding said hotly.

  “No, you listen,” snapped Tiberius. “I don’t have time to putter around with whatever old junk technology you pulled out of the scrap yard when we’ve got access to a full Imperial database here! If you had half the sense the gods gave a toad, you’d seat your wrench on something useful and help me upgrade this ship with new technology—something that can actually make a difference!”

  The old man was turning dangerously red in the face, and I could see that no one present was amused at the way this young new Chief Engineer was running down our old one.

  “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times,” the old Engineer purpled, “new doesn’t necessarily mean better, it just means different! There’s plenty of ways to do a job, and bein’ enamored of always trying something new before it’s been properly debugged will bite you on the hind end worse than trying to use a multi-tool on every job.”

  “Look, I understand,” Tiberius said with false and condescending comprehension, “you’re tired of new technology, have no new ideas, and an increasingly outdated skillset. That’s why you’ve turned to old, outdated—not to mention hazardous—technology and equipment. That’s why I urge you to join us in the current century and start trying to modernize your skill set before it becomes entirely useless!”

  “Useless? Outdated?! You have the gall to say I’m nothing more than a useless, tired old man, after the way I’ve saved this ship countless times!” cried Spalding. “You go too far lad,” he thrust a finger at the younger man.

  “This ship? Or do you mean the Clover?” mocked Tiberius.

  “Commander Spalding has proven himself through battle and blood,” I said, standing up and gazing at Tiberius coldly, “I pray you someday live long enough to become half the engineer you’re father is.”

  The younger man opened his mouth to retort, but I cut him off.

  “Enough,” I snapped, half a second away from tossing him in the brig. Akantha or no Akantha, no one spoke to my Chief Engineer that way—not even his own son!—even if the old man technically wasn’t the Chief of Engineering right now. I could, and would, change that in a heartbeat if this pro-parliament moron continued to test my patience.

  Lisa Steiner held her hand to her ear, fingers pressed against an earbud as she listened with a look of concentration which quickly changed to alarm.

  “Something I should be aware of, Comm.?” I said looking over at her with a question.

  “Perhaps in private, Admiral,” Steiner said, looking torn.

  “Here will be fine,” I said calmly, ignoring the way the rest of the table quickly stilled and all eyes turned to focus on the two of us.

  The little com-tech swallowed and then nodded. “A message just came in through the long-range array,” she said clearly.

  “Critical enough to interrupt the meeting?” I asked, allowing a hint of rebuke to color my voice, “Did Druid have another problem with the battleship?”

  “It’s a message, sir,” she paused and then her face stiffened into a professional demeanor, “a message from….”

  “Well spit it out, Steiner,” I frowned abruptly, “I have a meeting to run and we don’t have all day.

  She took a breath and nodded sharply.

  “Sorry, sir, it won’t happen again,” she said bracing
to attention, “it’s the Droids, Admiral. They’re the ones who sent the message over our ComStat Network.”

  My world rocked and the meeting room was immediately swept with pandemonium. Those members who didn’t understand the gravity of what this meant were quickly filled in by those that did: the droids had penetrated our recently-secured FTL communications network. Nothing we sent over it could be considered secure, since any encryption could be broken given enough time.

  “Thank you, Communications Officer,” I said, nodding absently, my mind scrambling. I wondered if maybe the next time my Comm. Officer hesitated to relay her information in a timely fashion in front of multiple witnesses if I oughtn’t give her the benefit of the doubt and take the message privately as she had suggested.

  “Yes, Admiral,” she said, stepping back.

  I closed my eyes briefly to prepare myself and when I did I was fully back, the Admiral in Command and not to be seen as unsure or doubtful.

  “Please send the message to my pad,” I said calmly, although I was pretty sure the way my lips thinned when I stopped speaking was a sure give away as to my real emotional state.

  My reader beeped and I quickly scanned the screen. It was brief and to the point, so I put it up on the conference room screen for all to see since holding it back would only cause rumors to run rampant through the fleet, potentially undermining my authority. After all, ‘why would he hide it unless it was bad news,’ they would ask? Better to lance this boil of my own creation as quickly and efficiently as I could. If it relayed information I’d hoped to keep secret until a later date then, well…I had no one to blame but myself—and possibly our ComStat-hijacking team.

  “Congratulations, we want to meet. Bring Moonlight. We want to discuss prisoner exchange, as previously agreed with the negotiating team but will only accept if the Captain is present to supervise transfer. We await your data exchange on this file—end of line.” That was the entirety of the message.

  More pandemonium ensued, with people yelling or shifting around in their seats. “Agreement? What agreement. What negotiating team?” Eastwood snarled.

  “Who’s this Captain the message references? And what do they mean by ‘moonlight’? Is it some kind of code, or a rare substance I’m not aware of?” demanded Lesner in abject confusion.

  “How the blazes did they penetrate our com-network?” Flag Captain Laurent barked, pausing to glare at Steiner. “I thought those FTL nodes were secure! Are they communicating to us through nodes we still haven’t hit, or have the machines penetrated our systems?”

  “Silence!” I yelled, adding an edge to my voice as I felt a sense of consternation as events felt like they were starting to spin out of my control.

  Almost as abruptly as if a light switch had been turned off, the room quieted.

  “Now,” I said momentarily at a loss by just how quickly everyone shut up and sat down. I took a breath, my jaw setting as I refocused on my current task: damage control. “Yelling and making a scene won’t help anything; at this point we are where we are at and no amount of fussing and fuming will help thing. We must…we have to focus on the task at hand. As for the negotiations,” I said, mentally pivoting at the sight of opening mouths and lowered brows and nodding, not incidentally cutting off the Phoenix’s First Officer before he could speak, “having no use for her, I decided to send the Confederation Representative off to negotiate with one of the Droid Tribes.”

  Looks of near mutiny appeared on many faces.

  “What the blazes is this, Admiral?” demanded Officer Eastwood, while others looked confused and concerned.

  “Watch your tone, First Officer,” I said sharply, my mind returning to the actions of another disrespectful First Officer of my recent acquaintance. The faintest hint of a smile crossed my face as I recalled his most likely fate, but then my good mood soured since, by its very existence, this message indicated that the fate I so desired was still in abeyance, “this was a carefully calculated response.”

  The First Officer looked uneasy and I realized it must be because of the expression that had crept up on my face as I considered Tremblay’s well-deserved fate. It was either that or the thought of dealing with Droids. In case it was the first, I wiped the expression from my face; this was no time to be thinking of my treacherous, traitorous former First Officer and Chief of Staff. But even so, I could tell that I was starting to lose them.

  “The droids contacted me, not the other way around,” I added shortly, not liking to have to justify myself—as if I hadn’t just spent the last almost two years fighting side by side with these men and women against every threat the galaxy had thrown our way. “How did they contact you, sir?” Lesner asked after it looked like no one else would.

  “It was through a confidential route I can’t speak about for security reasons,” I said evenly, “however, the contact was one-way: from them to me. I wasn’t the one to reach out.”

  “But you still sent a ‘negotiating team,’ Admiral,” the Chief Gunner asked, looking like he was working hard and struggling to give me the benefit of the doubt and still figure out a way that I wasn’t making secret backroom deals with the mortal enemies of all humankind.

  “Yes, Chief,” I replied gravely. “I decided that if the droids wanted to talk I was willing to send a pair of individuals who we could trust to find out what they really wanted, stall them for as long as possible, and not be missed when the Droids in all likelihood turned on them.”

  “You knowingly sent people over to the machines?” Eastwood asked as his eyes widened.

  I scowled. “The Traitor Tremblay and my backstabbing cousin Bethany have more than earned their fate. You could say that, instead of execution for their crimes, I’ve given them a chance at…if not redemption—as I’ll have no use for them even if by some miracle of Murphy they survive—then at least a chance at survival. I may be an Admiral and a Montagne but I’m not monster; they have their chance,” I said flatly. “But make no mistake, I sent a pair of criminals, mutineers, and would be murderers off to deal with these machines. They will do their best for us because, if they don’t, they will surely die. But yes, I did so with the full knowledge that they were risking their lives just meeting with the machines, even going with an invitation.”

  Several people looked ill, but they were mostly the ones who hadn’t been through the harrowing experience on the Omicron — or had actually met either of the two members of our ‘negotiating team.’ Those people who had met either criteria just looked grim.

  “Now, back to the task at hand: what prisoners are we talking about, and who is this Captain they want to meet with?” I said with a frown.

  “I have another,” Captain Atticus, the Lancer, said as he leaned forward and thumped the table with his fist, “why should we do anything they want?”

  “You leave our people in their hands?” Glue demanded right back, baring his teeth and thumping the table in turn.

  Atticus leaned back for an instant and then surged forward as soon as he realized that he’d done so.

  “Our people?” he said in a deep voice. “Are any of our people unaccounted for?”

  “Enough,” I declared. “I’ll be the one asking the questions around here, Captain.”

  Atticus’s lip curled and he glanced at Akantha, who arched a brow at him before almost sullenly turning back toward me.

  “Warlord,” he muttered.

  I gritted my teeth but let it pass. I knew that her native people felt more loyalty to her than to me. That said, such behavior could not be allowed to pass unmarked. I was going to keep my eye on the Captain.

  “Well?” I barked turning back to the table. “If anyone has anything to add, speak up. Otherwise we’re going to have to form a team to search the databanks and maybe even use our now-compromised FTL network to find the answer.”

  Heads shook and people exchanged uneasy looks and Lieutenant Tiberius just sat there shaking his head with his arms folded over his abdomen.

  Th
en our elderly Chief Engineer took a deep breath and leaned forward, his single red, mechanical eye gleaming.

  “I know what they’re after, Admiral. We can do it,” Spalding nodded with such a certain look to his single remaining natural eye that I wanted to believe the old engineer could pull something out of his hat for us for the umpteenth time. “Just leave it to me and I’ll whip up everything they need for the transfer. Why, down in the Locker, we have every—“

  Eyes all around the table locked on the wily old engineer and I could sense the belief rising in the officers around me and I heaved a surreptitious sigh of relief. One more obstacle rises and promptly get its head knocked off. Maybe with this out of the way we could actually—

  My thoughts were interrupted when the young, parliamentarian Engineer Officer who’d been looking more and more disaffected with his old man spoke, finally jumped to his feet, and knocked over the chair in which he’d been sitting.

  “Unbelievable,” Tiberius exploded. “The Locker? What guff! I don’t know what kind of wool you’re trying to pull over their eyes—and mine—but I’ve had it with your lies old man.”

  “Lock it down and snap yer yap, young sprout,” Commander Spalding growled, turning with an angry look toward his son.

  “Oh, that’s rich! I’m the one who should lock it down,” the young furious engineer rolled his eyes angrily. “Stuff your Locker and stuff you, Commander! Moonlight’s a myth; a holo-creation, a blasted cartoon…a lie, shown to little children who don’t know any better! It’s nothing to play with on the bridge of a real starship.”

  “You don’t know half as much as you think you do with that fool, thick head of yours, Lieutenant,” the Commander snarled, his hands opening and closing with rage.

  “I’m the fool with the thick head and tenuous grasp of reality?” Tiberius fired back. “When you’re the one who can’t tell a gods-honest fact from a legend. The entire time I was growing up all you did was lie and break promises, and here you are again, with more lies and fabrications. Dear gods, old man, do you have no shame! I understand if you have a death wish but the least you could do is fail to take the rest of us down with you.”