The White Fleet (Blood on the Stars Book 7) Read online

  Barron almost told her to continue, but she did before the words came from his mouth.

  “They suffered heavy losses, sir. General Rogan reports thirty-four confirmed dead and at least forty wounded. He reports massive damage to the internal areas of the structure…” Another pause. “…and he reports his people have taken a prisoner.”

  “A prisoner?” Barron tried to hide the shock in his tone, but it was too late.

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “One of the…unidentified…soldiers?”

  “Negative, sir. Apparently, they all fought to the death.”

  “A villager?”

  “No, sir. He says the captive is…different.”

  Barron almost asked another question, but he realized Eaton didn’t know anything more, not yet. He almost ordered her to get Rogan on the line, but then he said, “Get a shuttle ready, Captain. I’m going down to the surface to see this for myself.”

  “Sir…” He could hear the doubt in her tone, and he was about to tell her just to obey his orders when Travis spoke up.

  “You can’t go down there, Tyler. You’re the commander of the entire fleet, and the only one with anything resembling authority to speak…or negotiate…on behalf of the Confederation. It’s too unsettled down there. I know how you think, and I know how prone you are to disregarding your own safety, but now is not the time. There’s too much depending on you.”

  Barron was going to argue, but he held it back. He wouldn’t have listened to anyone but Travis, but he knew she was right. Still, he had to deal with whatever was happening on the surface. “I understand what you’re saying, Atara, but I need to see what we’re dealing with. We’ve got to cut some levels out of this chain of command and get closer to the scene.”

  “Let me go.”

  “What?”

  “You trust me to go in your place, don’t you? I’ll report directly to you. How much does Dauntless really need me when you’re sitting a meter away?”

  Barron wanted to refuse. He almost did. But she was right, and he knew it. “Okay, Atara…but I want you to be careful. We have no idea what we’ve stumbled on here. You’re not expendable.”

  “Well, we agree on that, Tyler. I’ll be careful. You know me.”

  He did know her…and that didn’t make him feel any better.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Planet Zero

  Zed-11 System

  Year 315 AC

  “He’s human, Captain. In fact, as far as the med teams can tell, he’s pretty close to a perfect human specimen. They haven’t done any blood or DNA testing yet. The subject is…less than cooperative, and we didn’t want to restrain him any more than necessary until you got here.”

  Travis was standing next to Bryan Rogan as the Marine updated her on the captive. According to Rogan, he was different from the villagers or the dead soldiers. The natives were the descendants of survivors of the Cataclysm, that much had been pretty well ascertained. Their physical deformities were the effects of mutations, probably passed down through the generations from those who’d survived the nuclear assaults but had suffered genetic damage from the intense radiation. Travis found the whole thing depressing, the idea of generation after generation of humans being born, and perpetuating the terrible damage done to their ancestors. But she had other problems on her mind now.

  The soldiers were different from the villagers. They seemed to have less in the way of mutations, though still some, but they were so…altered…they barely looked human. Travis had seen Marines in heavy combat gear, but the corpses she’d seen here hadn’t been wearing all of their armor. Some parts of it had been implanted in their bodies, and they were a terrifying combination of man and machine, with a partial exoskeleton of some kind.

  But the single prisoner was supposedly different. The image Rogan had showed her could have been of a member of Dauntless’s crew, and he was distinct from a normal person only in the seeming perfection of his physical characteristics. He was tall, his proportions close to the human ideal, and his posture was almost perfect. His teeth were utterly straight, his skin clear and blemish-free, and his eyes a clear bright blue. Travis didn’t doubt the reports that said he seemed to be extremely intelligent.

  “Well, Bryan, I guess there are a hundred things we need to deal with down here, but why don’t we start with the prisoner?” She looked up at the Marine. “Do we have a translation AI and a linguistics expert up there?” It was redundant to have both a live and AI interpreter, of course, but the occasion was a momentous one, and she figured it made sense to have every resource available.

  “Yes, Captain.” Rogan hesitated, just for a few seconds. Then, he extended his arm, gesturing down the path. “This way. He’s in one of the huts.”

  Travis nodded, and she waved her own arm forward, a signal for Rogan to lead the way. The two walked a short distance along a rough dirt road, passing between rows of the small, primitive shacks that seemed to be home to most of the natives. After sixty meters or so, Rogan slowed. There was a hut ahead, with a cordon of Marines holding back a crowd of the locals. The natives seemed restless…perhaps scared, she realized as she looked more closely. Some were on their hands and knees, crouched with their faces down to the ground, the tops of their heads angled toward the hut.

  She shook her head. She’d read the reports about the primitives the landing party had found, but it still came as a surprise to her. Whoever these people were, they were the descendants of a technologically-advanced civilization, one that had colonized thousands of worlds. How could they have fallen so far, lost nearly all the knowledge and technology they’d once possessed?

  She’d come up from the very bottom rungs of society herself, a penniless orphan on one of the worst industrial hellworlds in the Confederation. But, for all the vermin she’d known, rogues that would slit a child’s throat to steal a half-eaten candy bar, she’d never seen anything like the people of this world. They looked like something from the distant past, from legends of man’s pre-technology days on his long forgotten homeworld. Even beyond that, they looked…wrong…sick or injured in some way, though she knew that was their natural state, the inevitable result of their scarred and damaged DNA.

  Rogan shouted a series of commands to the Marines up ahead, and four of them moved back toward Travis, positioning themselves between her and the crowd of locals. She glanced up at Rogan and nodded, and then she walked forward to the hut and slipped through the opening, pushing aside what seemed to be some type of animal skin acting as a makeshift door.

  She stopped and looked across the room. Standing there, surrounded by several of the fleet’s doctors and another four Marine guards, was a man. He looked like anyone on the fleet, at least to an extent, though there was something vaguely different about him. He appeared to be extremely fit, and his physical proportions were almost textbook. He was wearing what appeared to be a baggy pair of pants and a loose-fitting tunic, all apparently made of extremely fine fabric. He had been facing the nearest of her people, but as soon as she walked in, he turned to face her.

  She returned his gaze and nodded, wondering if the gesture meant anything to her…guest. Then, she walked forward toward the translation AI, grabbing the headset and pulling it over her head. As she was still adjusting it, the man spoke.

  She didn’t know what he was saying, but the difference in his tone from that of the natives was astonishingly clear. His enunciation was far superior, and she could discern the haughtiness in his voice even while catching the meaning of only a few words.

  She pulled out the small microphone extension from the headset and spoke to the AI. “What language is that? And translate what the subject just said.”

  “The language is almost flawless high imperial, Captain. The subject said, ‘You will release me at once’…the final term is ambiguous. Creature, or worm. Or perhaps a variant on ‘inferior.’ An uncomplimentary term, certainly, one meant to show extreme disrespect.”

  Travis took a deep bre
ath, holding back the anger she felt. She’d slapped down more than her share of arrogant fools in her life, and putting up with that kind of attitude was not something she considered among her primary skills. Still, there was too much at stake here, and she resolved to hold her temper.

  Patience, Atara…patience…

  “Translate,” she said to the AI, then, “My name is Atara Travis. We mean you no harm. We just want to know who you are and where you are from.”

  The man glared back at her, and when he responded, his voice sounded, if anything, even more arrogant.

  “I am a Master,” the AI translated. “Why are you not on your knees, vermin? Do you wish death?”

  This isn’t going to be easy…

  “We are not from here. I cannot speak to your customs, but my people do not prostrate themselves to anyone, regardless of rank or stature.”

  She waited as the AI translated her words, and then as the man responded and the unit repeated what he said.

  “You are not Defekt. You are not Kriegeri or Arbeiter either. What are you? Where are you from? What is your purpose here?” A brief pause. “You are an invader. You will be destroyed unless you yield at once and accept the suzerainty of the Masters.”

  Travis shook her head, wishing for a moment she hadn’t volunteered to come down in Barron’s place. Her head was pounding. The captive was impossible, and his arrogance was overwhelming. He seemed to utterly ignore the fact that, whatever courtesies had been extended to him, he was, in actuality, a prisoner. Her prisoner. One she could shoot if she wanted to…or, more easily, give the order to a dozen nearby Marines she imagined would be only too happy to obey after the losses they had suffered. But she wasn’t here to pick fights, and certainly not to kill the only…Master…the landing party had found.

  But it enraged her that the prisoner didn’t even seem to consider the possibility that she would dare to take such an action.

  “We are not invaders. We are explorers. If this world is yours, we will leave it peacefully. We did not intend to trespass.”

  “None of that matters, Inferior. I am a Master. Yet you presume to hold me captive, and you do not prostrate yourself before me. I will have you flayed alive for your insolence.”

  Travis did sigh this time. The conversation was going nowhere. Whatever this…person…is, if he’s representative of whoever is in charge out here…

  She felt her stomach clench. This wasn’t going to go anywhere good.

  “Captain Travis!”

  She spun around. The voice was from one of the Marines outside the hut. “I’ll be right back,” she said hurriedly into the microphone, grabbing the headset as soon as she did and handing it to the Marine standing next to her.

  She raced outside, her eyes darting back and forth, trying to see what was wrong. Then, she saw.

  It was Bryan Rogan…on the ground, lying on his side and convulsing with some kind of seizure.

  “Get a medic over here…now!” But even as she shouted, she saw one of the landing party’s doctors rushing down the path toward the stricken Marine.

  * * *

  “We need more medpods, Admiral. We’re up to twenty-one cases now, each with the same symptoms as Bryan.”

  Barron sat quietly in his office, listening to Travis over the comm. He’d been worried enough about the discovery, not only of survivors of the Cataclysm, but also of their markedly superior technology. And now his people on the surface were getting sick. The first report he’d received mentioned only Bryan Rogan, but it hadn’t taken long for the follow ups to arrive, and for him to realize there was some kind of pathogen down on the surface, one that eluded all scans and analysis…and that had somehow affected Rogan and a number of others despite the fact that they’d remained on canned air the entire time they were on the planet.

  “I’m sending another twenty immediately.” The fleet had some provisions for supporting landing parties and ground teams, but he was already pulling units out of ships’ sickbays to supplement the spare pods in the cargo holds. “I’ve ordered more taken from deep storage, and I think I can get at least another two dozen from the sickbays of the battleships…but that will take longer.” He was talking about more pods than his people needed right now, he knew…several times as many. Neither Travis nor Barron had spoken the words, but they both knew they were dealing with an unfolding epidemic of some kind. He didn’t have a doubt they’d need however many of the medpods he could get down there, and as quickly as he could land them.

  There were more unsettling implications to that realization than Barron cared to think about. First among them was the plight of his people down there. With no details on contagion or concrete evidence on containing the spread of the—virus, bacteria, whatever it was…he didn’t even know what was at play. He realized he couldn’t allow any of the landing party personnel to come back aboard any of the fleet’s ships, and that knowledge preyed on his thoughts. They were all trapped down there…at least until his med teams could get a concrete idea of what they were dealing with.

  Atara was down on the surface. The thought of his friend trapped on the planet, at the mercy of some deadly disease, was eating at his control, a wave of despair trying to overcome the cold reason dictating his actions and decisions. He was worried about all his people, as he always was. But Atara had gone down in his place…and he’d allowed her to do it. It was his fault she was there, that she might end up dying of some horrible disease, even more than it was his fault all the others were there too.

  “The med teams have requested more equipment to aid their research, as well. If you could expedite that, I’m sure it would be helpful.”

  “Of course. I’ll see that it gets down on the next flight of shuttles. Anything else you need, call me directly, Atara. I don’t want the research teams hampered by lack of resources.”

  “I will, Admiral.” There was a short pause. Travis’s tone was cool, professional, with no sign of the fear he knew she had to be feeling. It was typical of her, the inner strength that had made her such a capable officer, and the one person on Dauntless he’d always truly considered a replacement for himself. “We need to discuss the prisoner…and these dead soldiers. I don’t know what it all means, but it’s pretty clear we’ve stumbled onto something well beyond anything we expected.” Another pause. “We need to be ready, Tyler…for whatever happens.”

  Barron took a deep breath and nodded, an ineffectual gesture since the connection was audio only and he was alone in the room. “What have you managed to get from the prisoner?”

  “Nothing concrete. He’s resisted any kind of comprehensive physical examination…and I’ve been hesitant to force him. If he resists, we might end up injuring him.”

  Barron nodded again, expressing his agreement with Travis’s caution. They had no idea who their sole captive was, but it seemed likely he was a representative from a technologically advanced culture of some kind, one that had somehow survived the Cataclysm, or risen from its ashes…and the initial contact had, to that moment, been little short of disastrous. The fleet had not come all this way to find a new enemy, and rough treatment of the captive could only make things worse than they already were.

  “No, don’t force him. Not yet, at least. What have we been able to discern without his cooperation?”

  “Well, he’s human, of course…but there was never any doubt of that. We did manage to run some DNA scans, using a hair sample we recovered from his cell.” She hesitated. “He’s human, as I said, but…” Another silence. Barron suspected she was struggling to choose her words. “He’s as close to genetically perfect as any specimen the med team has ever seen.”

  “Perfect?” Barron felt a discomfort he couldn’t fully explain. It seemed a difficult word to assign to a human being’s DNA, at least from a perspective of prevailing Confederation ethics and morality.

  “Yes…our best guess, without examining him more closely, is that he’s perhaps twice as strong as a normal man his size, possibly even st
ronger. His DNA profile appears to be absent almost every genetically-transmitted disease or weakness. Treading a bit further into speculation at this point, the team hypothesizes that he’s extremely resistant to normal pathogens, that his vision and other senses are considerably keener than what we consider human norms, and that his muscle tissue is denser and more efficient than in a…normal…person.”

  “Are you saying he’s some kind of superman?”

  There was silence for a moment. Then, Travis said, “I wouldn’t want to go there. Not yet, at least. But, it seems likely he’s a very highly-functioning human being, free of many of the weaknesses that plague the rest of us. If we want to go a bit further, into the realm of wild guesses, the team feels he would likely have a life span considerably longer than what we perceive as a standard human range. Perhaps twice as long…or longer.”

  Barron sat quietly for a moment, considering what Travis was saying. Finally, he asked, “Is it possible he was the subject of some sort of genetic engineering?”

  “That was my initial thought as well…but the team says no, at least not to the extent they can detect it. His DNA sequences appear to be completely natural. He just has most of the best and strongest gene combinations. More like…” She fell silent again.

  “More like what, Atara?”

  “More like an animal from a breeding program that utilizes optimal genetic matches…a racehorse bred from nothing but champions, for example.”

  “Eugenics. You’re saying that wherever this…person…is from, his people manipulate human bloodlines to…improve…the species.” Barron was uncomfortable with the words even as he said them. There was an undeniable logic to restricting reproduction to the most genetically ideal subjects, but it also went against every principle of Confederation society and morality. It was even difficult for him to think of people as genetically superior or inferior. He couldn’t imagine the government, as little as he cared for it or the politicians who ran it, telling ninety percent of the population they couldn’t have children because they were genetically inferior.