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  IronStar

  A "Second Contact" Novel

  A novel by Grant Hallman – all rights reserved. © 2013

  (rev.e)

  Cover art by Jennifer Garstang

  http://jennifergarstang.com/art

  An Exceptional Mission:

  Marooned by treachery and alone on an unexplored planet far from the frontier, Lieutenant Kirrah Roehl of the Regnum Survey Service finds herself in exactly the sort of simple, pastoral environment a jaded tourist, or a properly enthusiastic RSS field agent, would give her eyeteeth to explore.

  …Except that Kirrah is not qualified for fieldwork, and dislikes tourists. She is a highly trained and competent starship navigator, dependent on the technology she grew up with, and far more at home on the bridge of a starship than wandering the surface of a planet, trying to recall her rusty field survival training.

  …Except for the raiders, the politics, the monsters, and the young boy who saves her life, and the war she must wage and win, to save his.

  …Except for the locals who make her their Warmaster, trusting their lives to her skills and her promise that help will come, in the form of a ‘ship of iron’ that will appear in their sky as a star.

  …Except for the fact that she is not nearly so alone as she believed. It seems her Regnum is neither the only, nor even the first starfaring empire to discover this planet.

  …And except that somehow, when rescue finally arrives, things only seem to get worse. Altogether, a positively exceptional mission.

  Chapter 1: Surprises

  Chapter 2: Interlude.

  Chapter 3: Germination

  Chapter 4: Organized

  Chapter 5 (Landing plus one): Dinner

  Chapter 6 (Landing plus one): Picnic

  Chapter 7 (Landing plus one): Malame’thsha

  Chapter 8 (Landing plus two): Options

  Chapter 9 (Landing plus three): Talameths’cha

  Chapter 10: Interlude

  Chapter 11 (Landing plus seven): Audience

  Chapter 12 (Landing plus eight): Tourist

  Chapter 13 (Landing plus twenty-five): Skirmish

  Chapter 14 (Landing plus twenty-five): Arithmetic

  Chapter 15 (Landing plus thirty): Supply and Demand

  Chapter 16 (Landing plus thirty-seven): Interlude

  Chapter 17 (Landing plus thirty-eight): Transformations

  Chapter 18 (Landing plus thirty-nine): Stone Surprise

  Chapter 19 (Landing plus thirty-nine): Council

  Chapter 20 (Landing plus forty): Celebration

  Chapter 21: Interlude

  Chapter 22 (Landing plus fifty-one): Judgement

  Chapter 23 (Landing plus sixty-two): Cruising

  Chapter 24: Tubespace, En Route

  Chapter 25 (Landing plus sixty-five): Footrace

  Chapter 26: Flag Operations Center, RNS Belleville. Tubespace.

  Chapter 27 (Landing plus sixty-five): “Welcome to Talam”

  Chapter 28 (Landing plus sixty-nine): Interlude

  Chapter 29 (Landing plus eighty-five): “Only resting”

  Chapter 30 (Landing plus eighty-six): “Plan B”

  Chapter 31 (Landing plus one hundred twenty): Interlude

  Chapter 32 (Landing plus one hundred thirty): Parley

  Chapter 33 (Landing plus one hundred thirty): Plague of Screams

  Chapter 34 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-two): Accident

  Chapter 35 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-two): Interlude, Dreamscape

  Chapter 36 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-six): Contact

  Chapter 37 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-six): Ironstar

  Chapter 38 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-six): Another

  Chapter 39 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-seven): Debrief

  Chapter 40 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-seven): Sho’ito

  Chapter 41 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-eight): O'dakai

  Chapter 42 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-eight): Hostage

  Chapter 43 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-eight): Chain of Command

  Chapter 44 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-nine): Kaena’hachk

  Chapter 46 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-nine): Velocity

  Chapter 47 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-nine): Retribution

  Chapter 48 (Landing plus one hundred thirty-nine): Gifts and Promises

  Chapter 49 (Landing plus one hundred forty-one): Lessons

  Chapter 50 (Landing plus one hundred fifty-five): Happily Ever After

  Chapter 51 (Landing plus one hundred sixty-two): Interruption

  Chapter 52 (Landing plus one hundred seventy-five): Interlude

  Chapter 53 (Landing plus one hundred eighty-five): Postlude

  Appendix 1: Dramatis Personae

  Appendix 2: Glossary

  Appendix 3: Naval Specifications

  Appendix 4: Place names

  Appendix 5: Talamae Language & miscellaneous

  Appendix 6: FTL Physics

  Appendix 7: Author’s comments

  Appendix 8: Maps

  Chapter 1: Surprises

  “The use of the element of surprise as an effective weapon and force multiplier is well known throughout the annals of military history, and will be thoroughly covered in your tactical training exercises. Most frequently, however, the emphasis has been on the offensive uses of surprise. We now turn to its uses as a defense.” - Introductory address, Regnum War Academy, Tactical Training Class of 242 A.F.; Admiral the Right Honorable Dr. Cornelius Mansing, guest lecturer.

  In her dream it was dark, dark as Tubespace, but without its faint familiar warmth. This nightmare had a raw edge to it, ugly undertones of panic and hopelessness, and the dream-borne sense of something small and deadly in pursuit. Scattered across the darkened plains around her were others, people barely visible in the deep gloom, all fleeing. Something like black robes billowed behind each figure like ebony flames in the wind of their flight.

  Whatever was chasing them drew steadily closer, taking down one fleeing shape after another. She could see them tumbling into pathetic bundles of black rags, left behind on the plains. Soon the pursuer would be upon her. Kirrah felt herself starting to slide over the edge into panic. She began to moan and shake. No, something was shaking her….

  “Rise’n’shine, Lieutenant Roehl!” A familiar voice cut across her roiling images. Kirrah came awake with an abrupt gasp and sat up, but cautiously, an old sailor’s reflex acquired over years of bunking in narrow spaces. She blinked in her cabin’s dim red nightlight. A wedge of whiter light spilled in through the open hatch, along with a dozen subtle, familiar sounds of a Regnum Tubeship in transit.

  “Doris!… Uhhh, gimme a minute…” Her comrade and shipmate Lieutenant Doris Finch withdrew a slender, dusky-brown hand from Kirrah’s shoulder. She sat up straighter, ran long fingers through tangled dark-chestnut hair, tried to shake the clinging images from her mind.

  “Twenty-hundred, this is the shift we wanted, kiddo. First Approach, you’n’me.”

  Kirrah’s dark mood lifted a little at the thought. First Approach, the best silver lining in the mostly tedious life of the Regnum Survey Service. Weeks of boredom, punctuated by moments of terrifying intensity - a lifestyle familiar to pilots since Kirrah’s pre-space ancestors took to the oceans of Earth in open longboats, over twenty-five centuries earlier.

  Just then her personal wake-me chimed. Its display showed ship’s time, ‘19:45’. She absently reached across her tiny cabin to the workstation, tapped an acknowledgement.

  “Thanks, Doris. See you at mess, five minutes.” A quick visit to the head, a slither into a fresh shipsuit, a ride one deck up via the narrow portside manlift, and Kirrah stepped into the ship’s small galley. The bright even lighting, familiar br
eakfast smells and clean efficiency of the room banished the last residue of Kirrah's sullen dream images.

  After a hasty grab at the first thing on the automated breakfast menu, she stepped through the open messroom hatch. As always, she glanced reflexively out the ninety-degree wraparound polycor window. Unsurprisingly, all it showed at the moment was the dead black of Tubespace a few dozen meters outside. Her distorted reflection stalked her steps to the single long dining table.

  Doris and Master Chief Sammy Lee sat on the other side, facing her. Seated with his back to her was Captain Leitch, to her mild surprise having come off daywatch a few minutes early. She slipped into one of the comfortable anchored chairs on the same side, two down the table from the Captain, and pulled the cover off her breakfast.

  “Well, I'm betting we find ourselves a hablet this time,” continued Master Chief Lee to Doris, or, given her present interest in breakfast, possibly to no one in particular. “The remote survey looks good, and besides, it's our turn!” Hablets – Survey Service slang for inhabitable planets - were the reason the Service existed. Finding one almost always made a crew both wealthy and famous.

  “What, you already spent the bonus, Sammy?” asked Doris around a bite of reconstituted fruit.

  Sammy Lee’s oval, half-Oriental face took on the mock-wounded look he did so well. “Our dauntless Sensor Specialist, gone all cynical? Or you're still disappointed from last time?”

  “Aww, no one expected much from that old bachelor we did, what, three weeks back?” Doris replied, rubbing her cheek with the back of one hand. Kirrah recalled the system: a sterile old red sun, deep asteroid belt, no planets at all. “Boring as two rocks. Perfect for mining, though. The Mercs will bid themselves into the usual frenzy over it.”

  “Fine with me, Survey's been flying on Mercantile House money since I’ve been in space.” Sammy answered. “So, Kirrah, what's your guess?”

  “Hey, I’m just the driver. All I need to know is, it’s S22041 on the charts, Astro says it’s a solo G2 with multiple planets, and the mission spec says go there next. What about you, Sir?” Kirrah asked, turning to the fourth person at the table. She was still a little shy talking informally with a senior officer, but slowly getting more comfortable around Captain Leitch. Eleven years of service aboard much larger and more bureaucratically run merchantmen, made her appreciate the near-civilian informality he maintained aboard the Arvida-Yee: not quite family, and not quite crisply by-the-book. It worked well for this crew of nine.

  Such little things became important on missions lasting half a year or more. Discovery of the superluminal Tubedrive had opened the stars for humanity, but since a ship under Tubedrive was at rest in its own Tube’s metric, there was no handy time-dilation to shorten the subjective duration of a voyage. Thus their Survey vessel, a compact 12 by 50 meter, 1,300 tonne rounded-end cylinder, sported luxuries not typically found in such a small craft, or even in most much larger merchant or Navy vessels. Luxuries like the small private cabin Kirrah had quickly come to treasure, or a big window in the mess hall, or a Captain you could talk to.

  The Arvida-Yee was presently running two hundred sixty-odd lightyears and four months’ mission time from the borders of the Regnum Draconis and home, twenty-three days from their previous charting assignment. Three more systems to explore, another fifty days, more or less. Then a fifty-two day leg back to home port, then three weeks leave, and do it all over again. Join the Survey Service, see the galaxy. They just didn’t tell you how big it all was…

  Captain Leitch replied: “I think you’re all going to be late for watch. Older, wiser heads will let the new system speak for itself, when we get there in about… six hours. Plus two to set out standard probes, four to analyze the data… I figure by oh-eight hundred, I’ll be back on watch just in time for the executive summary. Have a nice nightshift, children, starting in,” another, more suggestive glance at the wall chrono, “ninety-five seconds.”

  Under his friendly but pointed gaze, the other three gathered up the remains of breakfast and headed for the galley. “Sammy!” he called, as the Engineer waited his turn at the disposal. “While these two hotshots are flitting us around the next system, why don’t you see if you can find that intermittent in the shuttle’s docking lidar? I don’t want anyone seeing ‘range unknown’ next time we try to put the bird in the bay. You never know when you’ll be in a hurry.”

  “Aye, Cap. I’ve got the kit down there already, think I can nail it this time.”

  “Good man. Let me know if you need anything. Sara’s good with that type of sensor, you have my permission to bother her off-watch, if you need an ear to bend.

  “Just don’t bother me off-watch,” the Captain’s words ran after the departing crew. “Because if you bother me,” his words followed Kirrah down the portside manlift, “that means something interesting is happening, and you know how I feel about interesting…”

  The lift buzzed softly through her soles as it took Kirrah sternward, ‘down’ in the ship’s current drive configuration. Past her cabin on Crew 1, past Stores and Mechanical, past Engineering 1, it stopped with a solid snick at the bridge, second-last deck near the stern.

  It’d taken her months to get over the sense of awe as she stepped onto a starship’s bridge. Years later, the now-familiar sight of rounded dark gray surfaces, central command chair and arc of colorful workstation displays still gave her hindbrain a small tingle, even as it brought her mind to a clear, professional focus. Everything seemed to hum with competence and sheer technological proficiency.

  The main viewtank showed only the scant external data available to the sensors of a ship under Tubedrive: a hundred-meter black ovoid bubble around their vessel, seething with quantum micro-fluctuations. The blackness glowed ever so faintly in the far infrared as occasional degenerate photons tunneled across the superluminal boundary, but conveyed no coherent information whatsoever about the outside universe.

  The First Officer, Lieutenant Commander Howell Docking, was already at his place in the command chair, Kirrah noticed with a tiny twinge of guilt as she quick-stepped to her post. The deceptively soft-looking man was amicable enough, but not someone to indulge inefficiencies. She stepped up behind the Helm station located in the center of the arc.

  “Good watch, Jerry?” she asked.

  “Clean’n’green, all shift,” the thin, sandy-haired man replied. “Lonely, boring, and spot-on trajectory. Just the way the boss likes it. Have a nice one.” Lieutenant JG Gerald Sykes, Second Helm, stood and stretched his back, pronounced the formal words that acknowledged Kirrah’s control of the small starship: “You have the Helm.”

  “I have Helm,” she replied, formally accepting the responsibility, and slid into the contoured seat directly in front of the command chair. Her eyes scanned the array of screens and indicators with practiced competence, hands and mind integrating in seconds into the familiar, intimate pilot’s connection with her vessel.

  “I have the Eyes”, Lieutenant Finch’s voice came from Kirrah’s left, as her friend completed the same small ritual with Ensign Sara Roe at the master sensor station.

  “I’m setting my wake-me for oh six hundred,” that youngest crew member said as she stepped back. “I don’t want to miss First Approach on this one. Angela says it’s just perfect for hablets. See you all in the morning!” Doris looked over at Kirrah, mouthed First trippers! and rolled her eyes covertly.

  ~~~

  Six hours later, true to his word Captain Leitch, along with the dayshift half of his crew, was sleeping as the Arvida-Yee swept towards the outermost approaches of their destination. The bridge was quiet, almost hushed.

  “Eyes, we should be coming up on our final nav sighting,” said Lieutenant Commander Docking softly behind Kirrah.

  “Right, Howell, I’m on it,” replied Doris. Her brown fingers flitted with practiced ease across her board, readying her sensors for the job ahead. Tubespace vessels found it prudent to periodically re-enter normal space for nav
igation sightings and course corrections, especially just before entering a new star system.

  Kirrah prepared the helm commands which would drop their small vessel into nearly the same metric as normal space, allowing a sensor pod to be deployed for Lieutenant Finch. The Tubedrive generator in the bow made a soft thrumming vibration as it shifted the shape of space outside their vessel.

  “Sub-cee transition in four…three…two… mark!” Kirrah recited.

  “Deploying sensors, display to the main tank,” added Doris.

  “So,” said Lt. Commander Docking as the viewtank came to life, “what have we…”

  “Hey! That’s grav-track!” Doris interrupted. “Missile grav-track! Hostile launch! Holy shit! Something’s firing at us!”

  Her words were punctuated by the urgent rising wail of the automatic collision alarm, and the sharp ‘blatt’ as she punched for General Quarters. In the main viewtank, the ship’s AI switched automatically to tactical mode. The high-resolution display showed the destination system, still light-hours ahead, and a red pip indicating an unwelcome intruder. A thin red line traced the grav-track of a missile - wait, three, now four missiles spreading across their path from the unknown source, already well on their way to englobing the Arvida-Yee’s projected course.

  “Helm, get us back up-Tube, Stat! Auto-evade, now!” snapped Lt. Commander Docking, as Kirrah began winding in the sensor pod. “No delay, dump the pod!” With a twinge of guilt at the loss of the expensive sensor suite, she dropped the cable and dialed full standard acceleration. The ship's auto-evasion Tactical AI began twitching their course randomly around its baseline.

  Cocooned at the center of its grav tube, her crew felt nothing but the thrumming of the drive as the small ship leapt deep into its own pocket metric, separated from suddenly hostile normal space by a dense double fold of induced pseudo-gravity. On the main display, the thin red lines converged on the green cone of their projected course envelope.

  There was a small snick as the spinal manlift behind the command chair deposited someone on the bridge. Rapid footsteps made straight for the vacant Engineering workstation to Kirrah’s right. Sammy, looking worried, came into her peripheral vision as he took his seat there. Lt. Commander Docking snapped off a course change: