Aurora’s Tale

By Tarot Barnes

With edits and advice by J.H. and Brantley

Part Two

Chapter 5

Four months ago

The Arion starship soared through the sky on wings of flame.

It was not a warship with a glittering hull and proud gun batteries, nor was it a troop transport, rugged yet simplistically elegant. It was a freighter, a vessel so ugly and unrefined that observers occasionally asked if it had been in a disaster.

This time, the observers would have been right, and the vessel’s ruin harried it like a cloud of hornets.

Along the craft’s flank, dozens of tiny shapes pelted its thin hull with missiles and shells. Already most of the freighter’s limited armament had been wrecked, and what remained was woefully inadequate -- especially as a fresh wave of reinforcements appeared on the horizon, each glistening shape laden with fresh bombs to rip out the starship’s vulnerable flank.

The small triumph had not been achieved without cost, however. Even now an attacker occasionally erupted in fire as one of the freighter’s frantic turrets found its mark.

Watching from a distance, worrying the enormous craft like a terrier, Aurora Fairchild curled her lip as she watched the Airskirmisher flame into the ground and explode.

She ached to avenge the death, but her role was not destruction. For some reason this ship had been spared the fate of its escorts. Instead, her job was to harass and distract the main fire away from the Porturegans.

She’d balked at the absurdity when she’d been first given this assignment. Smashing the ship was bread and butter to a Protector so why risk lives? She could have destroyed the entire convoy in less time than it took for the pilots to suit up.

But that, it she had been carefully advised, was precisely why she should not directly involve herself in the middle point of the mission. Destruction, she had been told, was undesirable when capture was a possibility.

That had stopped her cold. Capture? Why? It was a freighter. Its armament was a joke but as long as it could carry enough to provision an army, the Arions would never let the Porturegans steal it.

Looking for a way to describe how worthless the ship was, she’d finally exclaimed, “It’s just a big box attached to an engine?”

General Inácio had merely smiled and said, “Yes, a starship.”

So she’d gone along. She didn’t have to; there was no force on the planet that could make her to do anything she’d didn’t want too, Tset’lar included. But Protectors, whatever their rank, were supposed to be at their planet’s service and she could hardly deny that burning a huge fraction of the Imperial stores would be an immense victory. And even if she did, the number of men the General was pressing into this attack meant she could hardly have refused.

The war had wound down following Aurora’s near defeat at Tala’s hands. The column that had been intercepted, it seemed, had been a crucial linchpin in an ambitious scheme to regain the ground lost at Brilhante. Without it, the Arion army had fragmented badly and been forced into embedded pockets scattered randomly across the land.

The news hadn’t exactly helped Arion morale either. The destruction of an entire column had been bad enough, but when the news had been leaked -- helped in no small part by the Porturegan resistance -- that humans had also forced their invincible Tset’lar to retreat, Arion self-esteem had hit bedrock.

Thoughts of Tala sent Aurora back three months in time to that climatic battle. Even now its ghost still left her feeling unsatisfied: not so much because she had been close to death – it’d hardly been the first time – but because of the unsettling conclusion. Humans had driven the Tset’lar off, not Aurora, and that was not the way things were meant to be. She was meant to be a valiant, indestructible and powerful Protector of her people. She was meant to drive threats away. Any other result was… disturbing.

But, she reasoned, The Tset’lar is a new enemy; maybe they need a new solution?

Thoughts like those were also unsettling – the Protectors hadn’t changed their methods for millennia – but not so disturbing as the possibility of something upsetting the natural equilibrium. Humans were there to be protected; it was the founding precept of the Enlightenment. If they could defend themselves, they didn’t need protecting. And if that was the case, then what use were Protectors?

Then she thought of the Arions and the ship Inácio wanted captured. It brought a smile to her lips. At least for a little while, she was still needed… even if was just as a diversion.

Aurora worried the Arion ship both literally and figuratively. It had been explained – in painstaking detail – that, yes, she could smash every gun battery herself, but it would take time. Alternatively, the Porturegan air force could perform the same task quicker, and with a reduced risk of Tset’lar involvement -- Tala had shown a distinct reluctance to engage Aurora when humans were around in significant numbers.

Which was not to say the Virago was idle. On the contrary fully half of the defensive fire was being directed at her, and if that percentage slipped, she would punish the ship by ripping off another section of hull.

The task was painful, but it saved lives. Or at least Aurora hoped it was as she saw another golden stream blow a fighter, and its pilot, into a million glittering fragments. She just wished she knew what the military hoped to achieve. The freighter’s captain had to have realized they intended to board his vessel and would have destroyed any important documents long ago. The whole assignment seemed an exercise in futility.

She was distracted from her thoughts by a crackle in her ear, followed by a stream of instructions.

As much as it had brought death and destruction, the war had brought astounding advances. Most had been reverse-engineered from Arion equipment, the surrounding ’Skirmishers being a case in point -- even four months ago they could never have dreamed of successfully attacking a freighter. But some of the advances were the result of homegrown ideas. The small canister in her ear was one of the latter, and one she fully intended to inform the next Messenger about when he arrived.

It was just an ordinary radio, but small enough to fit into her ear. There was a minor disadvantage in that, so far as anyone could discover, it was impossible to remove. The device used what had felt like hooks to hold itself against her eardrum and while they didn’t hurt normally, any attempt to pull it free was agonizing.

Aurora didn’t mind, the bug didn’t interfere with her hearing and it enabled her to receive updates in the field. Unfortunately no transmitter had been successful; the device had to sit in a bodily orifice to be protected from supersonic travel but her ears were too far away and anything inserted into the nose made her sneeze. That left only her mouth. Technicians had tried everything from microscopic microphones to something that looked like a tiny sea urchin. The result had always been the same; she spoke one word and the machine imploded.

Which left her technically mute, but not exactly disadvantaged. Protectors had developed an entire language based on hand and body movement; it’d been the work of a few minutes to teach the Porturegans the motions for, “Affirmative,” “Negative.” and a few basic commands like “Attack that.” With some field spotters appropriately positioned, it was almost possible to have a conversation with people on the ground

In any case she considered the situation temporary. As soon as word of this invention got home to Velor, she was certain they’d be able to develop an alternative; Velorian technology was second only to Arion in most areas and surpassed it in many; surely they’d be able to come up with something that would enable two-way communications?

Another update came in. “*All units be aware. Tornado, I say again, Tornado.*”

Aurora nodded to no one in particular, dipped in acknowledgement and pulled away from the freighter. Tornado was the codeword for mission successful and warned everyone to fall back while the next phase was carried out.

Even from a distance the Arion vessel loomed. Although it shared the same arrowhead shape of all Arion star-craft, saying that it resembled a warship -- or even a coastguard cutter -- was like saying a gherkin resembled a banana. The only aspect that it shared with its proud brethren was its size.

When the Arion armada had arrived, it had been supplied from the holds of ten freighters. Three of those ships had been destroyed by Porturegan missiles during the initial attack, another two had been caught on the ground during a short lived nuclear exchange and the final five had been in the convoy Aurora had just ambushed.

It brought a warm feeling to Aurora’s heart to know that, whether they captured the freighter or not, she’d just starved an entire military.

* * *

The mission had been an example of espionage that even the Geheimites would have been proud of. The Arions didn’t like leaving their freighters on the ground because of their extreme vulnerability to attack, but the sheer effectiveness of the Porturegan sensor net made trying to hide them into orbit unrealistic.

As a result, instead of quickly moving large cargoes very quickly from site to site, each ship had been reduced to scuttling roundabout between origin and destination by way of Arion strongpoints. It was slow, inefficient and destroyed any hopes a local General might have had of receiving their divisions, rations or any form of logistical support in reasonable time.

Just why the Conquest General had decided to group their supplies together in convoy was lost at a level higher than the Porturegan agents had been able to penetrate, but that was an unimportant detail in face of what they had been able to liberate.

With that information, Aurora had been able to launch an entirely successful attack, obliterating both of the escorting corvettes and three of the four “expendable” freighters in her first pass. Personally, she debated how useful the information had been to her segment of the mission. Aside from where the ships were, what did it matter to her if one ship was suffering from poor engine maintenance, another hadn’t visited a dockyard in ten years and a third had had its FTL drive stripped to repair a damaged Destroyer? They were all Arion ships and all equally fragile. So far as she was concerned, one freighter was as good as another

Yet even as she’d thought that, the part of her mind that had stayed awake during training reminded her that in plotting a campaign, no information was unimportant so long as you knew how to exploit it.

* * *

Aurora sighed and turned her head against the slipstream. Her sharp eyes quickly sorted through the vast array of pursuing aircraft for the two that would so decisively end this battle.

She found them just as half the air fleet surged forward. In all respects bar the important one, the stage two aircraft were identical to their siblings. That was the idea. The Arion gunners, even exhausted from battle, were justifiably worried about anything that caused their enemies to drop back. If they had even the slightest idea what the pair was carrying, their pilots would have quickly been served their eternal award.

But they hadn’t and weren’t about to. The barrier ’Skirmishers would ensure that the Pair survived long enough to complete their mission.

The sky about the freighter was thick with metal, energy and exhaust as the Airskirmishers concentrated their gunfire and missiles in the freighter’s shields. The battle was spread a hundred miles in every direction, and in that cloud of destruction it was easy to lose sight of the Pair. For an instant Aurora herself lost them; when she reacquired them. they were already soaring away from two speeding white contrails.

Faster even than Aurora’s eyes could track, the pair of missiles soared across the intervening space, under the ship, through the gaps she’d torn in its shields, up into holes the Porturegans had blasted in the freighter’s armor, and detonated deep inside its hull.

For a split second two suns ignited on either side of the ship’s centerline, effortlessly blasting through deck plate, inner spaces, crew and equipment before blossoming out of the upper hull.

Instantly the freighter began to fall. Carried by sheer momentum, the starship seemed to drop in slow motion. At first it maintained its attitude, keeping level relative to the ground. Then as gravity began to take hold, the prow tipped leisurely towards the green savannah.

Soil and boulders fountained in every direction as the freighter struck the ground. Suddenly the vessel was a hundred meters shorter as the nose buried itself down to the bedrock and tore away like a lump of rotten flesh.

The squeal of metal under impossible stress was deafening even to the pilots above and it was almost obscene to see the massive beast gut itself on its own disintegrating fragment, spilling untold thousands of crates, debris and other materiel like glittering droplets of silver blood.

Hillocks were flattened. Savannah turned into a green wave ahead of the crashing bulk. A farm, buildings, livestock and fields were utterly crushed by the grey mountain. For miles and miles it skidded, seemingly unstoppable before it finally hit something – a mesa that looked like a model in comparison – hard enough to twist the hull and send it rolling.

Even then the behemoth appeared ready to continue, tumbling a path of destruction all the way to the sea. Then, gradually at first, yet more noticeable with every second, the juggernaut began to slow.

The freighter was a bit less than a third shorter when it finally stopped, the other thirty percent of its mass having been smeared over the landscape.

Following that trail like a column of ants descending on an elephant carcass, the Porturegan army readied itself to attack.

But it would take time for that army to marshal it before it could battle such a massive opponent, and the Virago grinned. She was useful yet again.

Only if she acted quickly, however; now that the freighter was on the ground, it was only a matter of time before its captain, assuming anyone was left to command, began having dangerous thoughts.

By now it had to be clear, even to the most dim-witted of commanders, that the situation was irrecoverable. His ship was a wreck. There was no way anything less than a Mobile Dockyard would be able to move it, and the Arion military was so overextended it couldn’t even consider lending support.

That left immolation.

As with every Arion ship, even one as ignoble as a freighter, the ship carried failsafe scuttling charges, which it was the commander’s duty to activate should he command be threatened with capture. If he succeeded, all the lives lost today would be wasted.

Fortunately, unlike the case with more impressive Imperial starships, no one had truly believed that anyone would put serious effort into capturing a freighter.

The scuttling system was well tested and robust. Clusters of high explosive packs had been welded into the hull between every frame and connected by shielded fiber optic wiring.

The explosives themselves were chemically inert and impossible to set off unless their detonators were bombarded with massive amounts of ultraviolet radiation. The wiring was flexible, hard to damage and laid out in a recursive pattern so that regardless of the damage, enough packs could be activated to ensure the destruction of the ship.

The crux of it though was that for all its ingenuity, the system still had a fatal flaw; every command had to run through a single computer. More important starships had at least two servers, each with its own redundancies. The military freighter, however, only had one. Admittedly it was buried half a meter inside a bulkhead behind some of the vessel’s more impressive defenses, but Protectors had a phrase for such protection; scrap metal.

* * *

Plunging into the ship through one of the many rents, it didn’t take Aurora long to realize that most of the Arions who might have stood against her were extremely dead. Being dragged across a continent had not been kind on the crew, and the few men and women to have survived were in no condition to offer much resistance. That left only the automatic defenses and they were designed for far less impressive opponents than a Virago. She smashed them anyway for fear of what they would do to her far more delicate humans.

When Aurora arrived in the freighter’s computer suite, she found a single Betan groggily holding his head and looking around in honest surprise. Since he wore the bands of a technician and carried nothing more offensive than a toolkit, she barely spared him a glance as she tossed her head and barked, “Get out.” 

The man’s grip on reality wasn’t strained enough to make him mistake a miracle and he all but ran for the door. Aurora didn’t give him a second thought as she examined the room.

Although she’d never admit it to anyone, computers made Aurora nervous. Their immense importance was matched by their extreme delicacy. Given that her primary purpose in life was to smash things, she often felt out of her natural environment.

But not now.  Her feelings and purpose nicely coincided in allowing her to smash one of the frustrating machines. It was just a shame she’d been forbidden – well, asked not too in the strongest possible tone – from damaging anything else.

It wasn’t hard to find her target; the concealing bulkhead was signed so engineers would know where to work. Its sole defense consisted of a large, very heavy panel bolted into the wall.

Aurora took great pleasure in ripping the thick steel out of the wall.

Delicately placing the now useless plate on the floor where it was unlikely to roll around and break something, Aurora applied the same level of force to the shinny black box it’d been protecting.

The router came away from the wall with a satisfying, if small, crack -- leaving behind the glowing ends of fiber optic cables. Bringing her hands together, Aurora smiled as the server disintegrated into sparkling bits.

Technically Aurora had merely made it more difficult for the commander to destroy his vessel, not stopped him entirely. If he was feeling especially suicidal, the captain could simply order one of his marines to fire a GAR into the engineering spaces, or order someone to decouple the negative matter magnetic bottles. Either option would very efficiently destroy not only the ship but the invaders as well.

Unfortunately the resulting explosion would not also only obliterate most of the Arion forces, but strip away the atmosphere and vaporize a sizable fraction of the world’s mass.

That alone should have been enough to stay anyone’s hand, but in case it was not the Empire levied hefty punishments against any who released negative matter near an inhabited world. The least of the things taken would be the man’s life – assuming he survived the explosion – followed by all his worldly assets. Crippling fines would then be levied against his house and, if he was a Betan -- highly likely in this case -- his entire family would be executed.

The Empire most emphatically did not want to be the first nation to drop negative matter in case others followed their example.

Retreating the way she’d come – she had been specifically requested not to inflict any more damage than was absolutely necessary – Aurora paused only to put those Betans who were beyond hope out of their misery. The merely wounded she left to the care of her Protectorate. She wasn’t cruel; although she hated Arions with an intensity few non-Velorians could understand, she would not kill for the sake of killing, or allow an opponent to suffer needlessly; those were Imperial traits. She doubted that had the situation been reversed, they would have done the same for her but as her parents and teachers had stressed to her, that wasn’t the point. She could not bear allowing anything to suffer, especially a fellow Supremis, when she was in a position to help.

Aurora exited the downed freighter through the same breach she had entered and soared high. Hovering a few thousand feet above the wreck, she peered through the billowing smoke to the chasm that it had cut through the landscape.

Beside the new gorge, racing so fast that her sharp eyes could see clods of soil being thrown into the air; tiny dots converged on the downed leviathan.

Aurora had a part to play in boarding the Arion vessel as well, but she hesitated for an instant to sample the air. Moments of pleasure -- interludes with a certain vacuum craft Comandante notwithstanding -- had come so infrequently the past year that she could count them on both hands. She felt that, just this once, with victory so close, she deserved the opportunity to savor the moment.

The moment never came. High above the freighter, the sky should have been clear and cold and crisp, but it wasn’t. Heat and smoke from the damaged ship rose even to her height, polluting the atmosphere with a hideous assortment of alkenes, fluorocarbons, sulfides, heavy metals, all manner of oxides and innumerate other toxins.

Other Protectors, Aurora knew, would have taken the bitter tasting air as a symbol of victory and boasted about it for decades, but the Virago couldn’t. To her it was only another in a long line of atrocities the Arions had inflicted upon her planet; while her body either filtered or processed the pollutants easily, she knew that the Porturegans were not so fortunate and she spared a moment to worry about the effect the crash would have on the ecosystem.

The fires that blazed within the shattered hull were fed by the exotic materials of its construction. Worst among the offenders were the enormous pits dug by the Porturegans’ micro-nuclear attack. The freighter’s dampening systems had done miracles to reduce the scale of the destruction, but even so the vast holes in the hull belched out solid black columns of smoke, which even high altitude winds couldn’t entirely disperse.

Worst of all, at least from a tactical point of view, was that it might as well have been a signpost for the ease with which it would identify their position to the Arions. Although there was an irony in that; for all the pride the Arions had in their technology, it would be a smoke signal that would lead them to their lost ship.

The smile faded as she realized the reality behind her ruminations; the Arion military was doubtless already on the move and had a signpost that reached up into the stratosphere to guide them. Whatever secrets her protectorate wanted to lift from the ship would have to be moved quickly, and for that to happen, she would have to move even faster.

Allowing herself to fall backwards, Aurora powered down into the leviathan’s wreck.

Chapter 6

One month ago: Séuchão Estak spaceport.

From the back of the puercarta drawn wagon, Séuchão Estak was no less impressive than it was from the air. Located in a valley that had been carved out by a glacier, the spaceport was surrounded by tall lavender hills, rolling mosslands and shivering copses that were small outposts of the vast frond forests just visible on the horizon.

Against such organic beauty, the harsh aeneucrete structures should have been an imposition as ugly as a knife in flesh. Yet the beige towers, which grew like an unearthly crystal, made an unlikely complement to the mauve valley floor.

Envisioned in far simpler times, Séuchão Estak had since adapted itself to the needs of a civilization on the verge of interstellar travel. Originally designed to service a single vacuum ship, it had expanded enormously with vast strips of tarmac spreading out from the epicenter of spires like the petals of an alien flower.

Recalling the first time she’d seen it, Aurora remembered how even the monochrome spectrum of vc’spa vision couldn’t detract from the elegant simplicity of its design. As with all things her protectorate created, from their language to their art, it was austere, yet striking.

But then, she reflected with a secret smile, I had other reasons for liking this place on top of the design.

That reason was no less valid today than it had been then.

Admittedly the last time she’d arrived, it had been amidst the glitz and pageantry of a company celebrating the construction of its dozenth vacuum craft, not huddled beneath the rough cloth of a covered wagon so her movements would be hidden from the Arions, but that wasn’t the point.

…Of course, back then she’d also known why she was coming. This time she had been summoned – “At best speed, for reasons that can not currently be explained.” Aurora didn’t like that; her protectorates were keeping too many secrets from her. It showed a dangerous degree of independence.

Aurora grunted and resolved to break the habit before it became a custom. Later.

The cart rolled slowly past the titanic structures that had served the port when it was still active, a flyspeck on a dinner plate. Back then the fuel tanks, hangars and office blocks had been hives of activity as technicians and businessmen bustled about their lives.

Now the place was… Aurora’s mind shied from the word “dead” and sought another; ‘inactive.’ In her mind the port went from an alien flower to a machine that the war had switched off. Now it was waiting for the busy hum of life to set it in motion once again

As the cart ambled towards the port’s center, the already immense buildings grew vastly taller as horizontal space became a premium. Séuchão Estak was much like a city – it was as large as one – with wide flat productive areas surrounding a central business district, which oversaw its vital functions.

But now the towering skyscrapers were deserted. Layers of dust carpeted plush entrance foyers and fungal growths clouded the windows. Interspersed amongst industrial giants like Ballistic-Deliveries, Lunatour and Aloc-Acoc were decidedly non-vacuum related businesses. The insurance brokers, taxi services, cleaners and fast food companies had, if possible, been struck even harder by the downtime -- as they fed off the industries for which the port had been designed.

Still, even they were preserved. The people were gone but the buildings remained. A quick wipe down, a new infusion of workers, and it would be hard to tell there’d ever been a lull.

The wagon’s driver -- actually a gabo in disguise -- grunted something unintelligible and waved his crop vaguely towards one of the bunkers. Aurora liked to pretend that his appearance was wholly an act, but after watching him steadily drain a flagon during their trip, that pretence was becoming harder and harder to believe.

Pulling her robes tighter about her body, Aurora paid the man his fare (she was supposed to be a nomad after all) and disembarked.

No sooner had her feet touched the ground than the wagon started up again. That was a little too much in character for Aurora, who resolved to comment on the man’s “acting.” Watching the cart meander off, she was glad the puercarta dragging the wagon at least had some sense; otherwise it would have gone off the road long ago.

Before too long, even at the cart’s slow speed, Aurora was alone in the port with nothing but the drunken gabo’s assurance that she was at the correct hangar.

Well… maybe not just his assurance; the air carried the beguiling scent of humanity, and the bitter tang of motor vehicles.

The hangar itself was huge, easily twenty times as tall as she was; yet even it was still a runt by the scale of the rest of port. To all outward appearances it was as dead as everywhere else. Internally, it was no better with nothing to see but an occasional tarpaulin covered vehicle and dusty aeneucrete.

Nothing but those vehicles, and a single doorway concealed in a machine’s shadow with a crude iconograph stenciled above it.

Subtle. Aurora smirked as she walked towards the door. From one perspective the picture was just a flower with an insect buzzing off… but from another, it was the explosive cloud of a rocket departing its pad

There wasn’t so much as a lock on the door, and the hinges squeaked as it opened onto a dingy stairwell that descended into blackness. The máscara was so good that Aurora almost believed that she really had been brought to the wrong hangar.

Then there was movement to either side and Aurora forced herself not to react as two sentries leveled their rifles at her. Porturegans were experimenting with battle armor and the incomplete grey metal they wore made them look a bit like medieval knights.

“O dia é bom, meus amigos.” She said. <“I understand a flash bang is to be set off into the hereafter. Is this not true?”>

“It is.” The guard to her right relaxed at the code phrase. Standing at ease he continued. “It is an honor to receive the Fair Child.”

“Thank you.” Aurora resisted sighing and turned her attention to the other guard and the unwavering lines of his still drawn weapon. The Virago eyed the long black rifle with slight unease -- the speed at which Porturegans had advanced their knowledge of GARs was almost frightening; the latest model could hurt her -- then asked. “Is there something wrong?”

“Don’t mind him.” The first guard answered, then speaking to his friend, ordered, “Stand down, gabo.”

As smoothly as an automaton, the corporal brought his gun down, clicked his heels and stood at ease.

No emotion was visible beneath the peak of the man’s helmet, but Aurora knew the symptoms; unyielding stance, robotic responses, and a perpetually distant gaze. “BFKS?” She asked.

The guard nodded reluctantly. “He is still a good soldier.”

Aurora couldn’t deny that. Battle Fatigued Kourn Syndrome sufferers were perfect soldiers, but poor human beings.

So far as Aurora was aware -- and she had to admit her knowledge was limited to rumors she’d heard while in school on Velor -- BKFS was a condition unique to the Porturegans. Humans on other planets contracted mental disease as a result of battle-induced stress, but that usually made them less able to fight. Whatever switch it flipped, BKFS instead turned them into maniacs; if someone with BKFS was told to fight, he would do so until he was cut down, ordered to stop, or simply died from exhaustion.

So far no one knew what caused the malady, or how to cure it. At the moment the best that could be done for the victims was to take them off the frontline and put them on rearguard duty. Such a decision seemed ridiculous when the condition was first discovered; every General wanted troops who wouldn’t stop, but it soon became apparent that while those with BKFS fought tirelessly, they didn’t fight with much skill. Instead they did it with the same mechanical precision they did everything else; if told to march in a straight line they’d walk off a cliff; if told to shoot they would exhaust their ammunition into empty air. If told to guard -- Aurora looked at the corporal’s GAR again -- they would kill anything that moved. Obviously this man was only lightly touched.

“I am sure he is.” Aurora returned her attention to the first sentry. “I meant no offence and hope your friend recovers. Is it down there?” She gestured to the stairwell.

“Yes, madam.” The sentry took a light patch from a recessed alcove and presented it to her. “If you will take this it will ensure you do not fall and…” he caught himself. “So you will not fall.”

“I thank you.” Aurora took the patch, squeezed it once to flood the chamber with light, then stuck it to her left breast. She didn’t need it to see, but Protectors were used to accommodating their protectorates and she no longer thought anything of complying with their wishes

As she descended the slightly damp staircase -- sometimes the máscara could be too realistic -- Aurora was peripherally aware of the two soldiers melting back into the shadows. That they did so wasn’t surprising, their skill was. Even with her senses, Aurora found it difficult to detect them.

She shrugged and continued her descent. Anything that improved her protectorate’s chances of survival was a good thing… but it was one more secret they were keeping from her.

* * *

Leaning against the high gantry’s rail, Aurora surveyed the vast launch bay.

Without exaggeration, Séuchão Estak’s catacombs were a natural and engineered marvel almost on par with the massive facilities above them.

When the spaceport had first been planned, the site was almost abandoned when enormous networks of granite and quartz caves were discovered – how they’d formed was a mystery. The plans to pull out were halted at the last moment when a group of engineers successfully demonstrated that the caves, if excavated, could be worked into storage areas, which otherwise would have to be built on valuable surface space.

The engineer’s arguments were debated, but ultimately accepted and the caves were changed into the vast bays Aurora now looked over. They so enormous that they could generate their own weather. The Arion freighter she’d fought three months before could have fit into the bay before her, and it wasn’t the largest.

Aurora couldn’t even see the far wall with normal vision, although that might have been true even if the room was reasonably sized. Lighting was cut back to the operative area to minimize the project’s electronic profile.

Shaking her head, Aurora stood and paced the gantry towards the office complex that had been built into the wall. Like most of the structures below ground it had been built forty years previously, and hadn’t been upgraded since. The door handle squeaked as the Virago let herself in.

No one was inside, which didn’t surprise her; there was nothing to guard. In spite of being the seat of Séuchão Estak’s mission planning, the offices were little more than a series of small rooms cut a hundred and fifty meters above the floor with great views of the storage bay.

The view, however, wasn’t good enough to explain what she was seeing.

Walking up to the glass, Aurora tried again, breaking the vista down into its constituent parts.

The bay floor was a hive of activity, so much so that she could barely see the aeneucrete. If it wasn’t people, it was equipment, most of it large and bulky, being dragged either towards or away from the shape that rose like a quicksilver mountain in an ocean of turbulence.

Aurora couldn’t help but notice that the bulkiest equipment wasn’t coming back.

The shape was familiar. It couldn’t help but be; it’d been the first non-celestial object she’d seen after exiting the Betah Stronberg wormhole.

The ship was called The Lance and it was the most advanced deep vacuum vessel the Porturegans had. At least as far as the Porturegans could measure; just flying from the wormhole to Betah Stronberg, Aurora had traveled almost as far as far as The Lance had in all its years of service.

The memory brought a smile to Aurora’s lips, although she hadn’t known it at the time, it had been her first encounter with Beni.

Speaking of which….

“What am I looking at?” She turned as the door opened, revealing her paramour’s tall form.

Benigno Allvariz grinned, revealing a lot of teeth and gestured towards The Lance. “What do you think you are seeing?”

Aurora cocked her head.

“I can see your vessel being prepared for launch -- apparently by cannibalizing more modern components from other vacuum craft. I can see approximately fifteen hundred engineers at work, with maybe another six hundred support staff and one hundred and twelve crewmen in pre-launch preparations. For some reason I can see Arion equipment being…” she peered closer, “built into The Lance, including what looks very much like the navigational deflector from that freighter.”

She looked Beni straight in the eyes. “If I didn’t know better, I would believe that you were preparing for a mission?”

The vacuum pilot’s grin widened. “But that would be suicidal.” Crossing his arms and lecturing as if dressing down a cadet, he announced, “Even if we could build Vacuum Warcraft, The Lance was designed for exploration; the Arions would blot it from the sky without a thought.”

“And with considerably less effort.” Aurora shook her head. “But then, intelligent thinking has never been your strength. Reckless bravado and a head for numbers however…” Taking another long look at the hive of activity, she took in the engineers, the science vessel, and the Arion components being installed into it. Finally she allowed a small smile to crack her lips, “You have finally mastered faster than light travel.”

The sound of clapping drew their attention to an elderly gentleman in a black uniform so heavily starched its corners were in danger of scratching anyone who came close. “They said you were brilliant; until now I never quite believed it.”

At the sound of his superior’s voice, Benigno instantly brought his heels together snapped his head back and executed a salute neater than Aurora would have believed him capable of. “General Secretária. Sir.”

Aurora, who was not in the military and obeyed terms of address purely as a courtesy, took in the cut of the General’s uniform, the quality of the polish on his boots and the general cleanliness of his person. She nodded. “Casimiro.” As far as she was concerned, anyone -- even a General Secretária -- who could afford such luxuries in time of privation was a criminal. Even Benigno, who had been denied military service because of his value to the vacuum program, had a uniform that was creased and dirty from working on The Lance.

If the General noticed her snub, he gave no sign. Instead he nodded towards the ship and the work crews. “You are at least partially correct Ms Fair Child. As a matter of fact we were on the cusp of creating a faster-than-light engine ten years ago.”

This revelation drew a surprised glance from Benigno.

“The information was not leaked to the public, however, because we knew the Arions were taking an interest in our world and felt any overt signs of advance might give them more cause to invade. There were also some… technical issues we had yet to surpass.”

“Technical issues?” Aurora’s ears pricked. How could they think about shooting her lover more than three hundred thousand kilometers per second with something that had “technical issues?”

“Among other things, we didn’t yet have an ultra-massive particle deflector,” Benigno volunteered.

Aurora raised an eyebrow in his direction and wondered how long he had known about the FTL engine. Not the ten years obviously, but certainly longer than she had. Bringing her attention back to the discussion she mused.

“You may not have had the equipment, but the Arions did.” She remembered the FTL-UMPD and other equipment she’d airlifted out of the freighter. “That is why you wanted that ship, and that ship only.”

“Yes, the others were, for one reason or another, unsuitable donors” Casimiro simpered, holding his hands behind his back and gazing at The Lance. “Although given time we would have worked out the issues on our own, why should we miss such an opportunity?”

Because of the lives lost in obtaining it, Aurora thought bitterly, but the General Secretária went on regardless, actually clapping dry hands together as he announced.

“Now we can propel a craft to super-luminal velocities without fear of losing it to some speck of dust.”

“I should have been informed.” Aurora said.

“You were a security risk.” The General answered simply.

“A security risk!” Aurora exploded. “I am the most secure person on this planet. Without me you would not have survived a month!”

Coolly, the General answered, “Of course, and we appreciate your efforts. Unfortunately, that is precisely why you were not informed. Your activities bring you into constant, even intimate, contact with the enemy. If you were captured--”

“I would never betray my Protectorate.” Aurora interrupted, furious at his implication.

Perhaps sensing that he’d pushed her too far, or even out of a genuine sense of regret, the General dipped his chin, “…Yes. But we still could not take the risk. This mission is quite literally our only chance of success in this war.”

Aurora jabbed her finger at The Lance. “That vessel could not succeed against an Arion Airskirmisher. If you think you could it attack the Arion fleet, you are insane.”

“Of course it could not.” The General dismissed the suggestion. “We intend to deployed it as far away from them as possible.”

“I fail to understand, what use can a FTL ship have if not to fight?”

“By not fighting.” Benigno took her arm.

Aurora looked at his hand coldly. Although he was tall, even for a Porturegan, she had several centimeters on him and she used every millimeter as she said, “You seem to know a lot about this.”

Quickly removing his hand, Beni answered, “Believe me I would have told you if I could but I have been in quarantine for the last month; they only told me why last week.”

Aurora looked into his heartfelt expression and her heart melted. Her protectorate still practiced the custom of segregating their vacuum personnel before a launch, both to focus them on the mission, and to reduce the chance of injury.

“I apologize,” she flushed. “I should not have used that tone with you. But I still fail to see how The Lance, even equipped with an FTL engine, can make any impact on this war?”

“We are going to ask for help.” Beni answered slowly.

“Help?” Aurora cocked her head again. “From whom?” The only race other than her own who could even contemplate taking on the Empire were the Scalantrans and, given their history with Aria, there was no chance of them lending her Protectorate a pen, let alone weapons.

“From the Velorians of course.” Beni spoke softly. “We are going to ask them for more Protectors.”

“Not to belittle your own efforts.” Casimiro said, a little too quickly. “But the situation on the ground is becoming desperate. So far we have been able to keep the Arion army from regrouping, but they still control vast areas of territory, much of it important. Even if we manage to keep their fleet at bay -- a prospect that grows progressively less likely -- they are slowly starving us to death. And now that their Tset’lar has started to attack military targets…” He shook his head. “The Primes were bad enough but, with respect, even you can not even push Tala back without massed armor support.”

Aurora bristled at the suggestion that she needed human help in anything, but since it was true, she said nothing. Instead she shook her head, “Velor is thousands of light years away, sixteen wormhole transitions. Even an Arion ship would take months to reach it.”

“Of course we do not intend to visit your homeworld,” Casimiro answered, slightly testily, “Its environment is lethal. But there is more to your society than just Velor?”

Aurora was taken back by the question, “I am not sure what you mean?”

“I mean the Enlightenment of course,” behind his back, Casimiro’s hands clenched.

“Yes?” Aurora frowned, golden eyebrows meeting, “what about it?”

“We have only to reach that. The nearest planet is only one transition from here, is it not?”

“Yes,” Aurora repeated, the threat to that system had been part of the reason she’d been assigned to Betah Stronberg.

Casimiro’s skin wrinkled as he smiled thinly, “And once we reach that planet, we will ask for help.”

Shocked indignation hit Aurora, “Christa Jah’ala will not abandon her protectorate to come help me!” She was offended at the very suggestion of running to another Protector for help; the last woman to do that had received the help she wanted, but also been laughed at and never protected anything more important than a desk for the rest of her life.

But Casimiro waved his hands, “You misunderstand, Fair Child; we know how valuable Protectors are to their worlds and would never hope to deprive another of theirs.” It went unsaid that “never hope” wasn’t the same as “would not ask.” “We merely want access to the Enlightenment communications, she will grant that, surely?”

“She will…” Aurora nodded uncertainly; there was no dishonor in that. “But to what end. If you want to send a message we could simply wait for a messenger.”

But the General Secretária shook his head, “Your Messengers are quite impressive, Fair Child--” somehow when he used the honorific, it was with anything but flattery-- “but they are arrive at monthly, if not yearly, intervals.” Casimiro retorted. “We can not afford to wait any longer and we understand that you have a faster than light system instead?” There was just the faintest glint of hope in his dark eyes.

“There… is,” again Aurora nodded, “but it is far from instantaneous.” It was in fact just a relay of drone craft, which darted from system to system. They could move faster than normal ships because they carried no crews but even they were barely twice as fast as ordinary vessels.

“It is better than nothing,” Casimiro shrugged.

But Aurora wasn’t finished. “Even assuming you could reach it -- you have not explained how The Lance will survive the wormhole -- I can not remember the last planet that successfully requested additional Protectors. There are worlds, such as Terra, that have more than one, but they are almost always the result of unique circumstances” -- that being a Protector’s euphemism for bureaucratic bumbling. “A world is assigned the number it requires, no more.” She shook her head to emphasize her point.

“And we would not think of draining the Enlightenment’s valuable resources unjustly.” Casimiro answered with diplomatic smoothness. “Your bureaucratic system is notorious for its… rigidity, but we understand that the Protectors occasionally form “Strike Teams” of Protectors and one or more Viragos to deal with Tset’lar. We will request one of those because of our precarious nature, and strategic position.”

And once the team had killed Tala… well they were Protectors and humans were in danger. Aurora bit back the pleasant image of her sisters crushing the Arions and looked at him accusingly. “How do you know about the Strike Teams, they are supposed to be Secret?”

Casimiro merely shrugged. “We just listen. As I said, this area of space is important. Although we do not understand why, it seems to be the only place where ships can pass safely, and not all of them secure their communications.”

“I’ll have to speak to someone about that.” Aurora murmured. If a primitive planet like Betah Stronberg could learn the Enlightenment’s secrets, Skietra only knew who else was listening. “You are correct about the Teams.” She sighed. “And, I must confess that if I could risk the weeks it would take to reach Christa, I would have asked for one. “But you must understand that they are temporary only; once their mission is complete they will depart.”

Casimiro visibly stiffened and fluffed his lapels in contempt. “And well they should. We have not fought the Arions only to become trapped under the Enlightenment’s thumb.”

Aurora twitched at the implied insult. “And what about me?”

Casimiro looked at her in surprise. “You are our Protector and we embrace you as such. More than one of you would be… more difficult to tolerate.”

Aurora breathed slowly. “The Enlightenment is not a charity, General Secretária. We do not send out Protectors merely for the sake of your humanity.” This was a half-truth at best, but she wasn’t about to admit anything, especially when the truth was so obvious. “Your attitude will change, I can assure you of that.”

“Oh?” It was Casimiro’s turn to look accusing. “Is that so?”

“Of course. You are a short-lived race, Mister Secretária, if not this generation than the next. Sooner or later your people will see the light. It is only a matter of time and we can afford to be patient.”

Beside her, Beni gently hissed, “Aurora,” and gave her an imperceptible kick. The Virago instantly throttled back, realizing the fool she’d made of herself in allowing the general to bait her.

Casimiro’s jaw twitched at the reprimand but he didn’t rise to it, instead he placed his gaze firmly on The Lance. To Aurora’s surprise he visibly relaxed, just like a Nav’ere would draw strength from the sight of the Tome.

“Maybe not even that long,” he said with a drawn out sigh, “I do not like it but the percentage of Believers is increasing daily. Clearly not everyone fears what your world will do to ours”

The old man’s tone was so sad it managed to touch Aurora, and she felt obliged to admit the truth, “As I said, we are not a charity. The Enlightenment may ask a price for their Strike Team.”

Casimiro turned back to her, surprise on his face. “They would? What do we have that would be any value to the Enlightenment?”

“Membership”

“Oh,” Casimiro’s face went blank.

“It is not a heavy price,” Aurora consoled.

“It is everything we have,” Casimiro shot back, “what you are saying is that in order to save ourselves from one Supremis race, we must submit to another?”

The Virago could only shrug; to her it wasn’t an issue. “It is the way of things, General Secretária. No world can stand alone.”

“If we are not with you, we are against you?” Casimiro asked darkly.

“No,” Aurora shook her head, “if you are not with us, the Arions will take you; it is only a matter of time” Again taking pity on him, she continued, “It is not fair, but the Arions want you, your planet and most of all they want your people. The Enlightenment is the only power that can stand against them.”

Casimiro raised an eyebrow, “Membership guarantees protection?”

“Almost,” Aurora admitted, surprising him. “Arions will not attack an Enlightenment world.”

“Why not?”

“Because Supremis do not wage war on one another; Skietra forbade it.”

“You kill each other though?” Casimiro asked, but it was Beni who answered.

“We kill each other as well, sir, but I would not call it war.”

“Why have you never mentioned membership before?”

Aurora shrugged, “You were not ready. Membership is usually only given to translight worlds.”

“But it guarantees Protection!”

Aurora flinched, realizing what she’d said; “Once a world has been accepted into the Enlightenment the Arions will not return, but if they have already committed troops…” she left the rest unsaid.

“Will the Enlightenment not send reinforcements?”

“That would be war,” Aurora said simply.

“Then what use is membership?”

Aurora considered explaining the economic benefits to the General Secretária, but they would mean less than nothing to a man whose world was being conquered. “It is not the same as being alone; the Enlightenment will not send more Protectors, but there are other forms of aid.” Which would be sold at deferred and extremely reasonable prices, but again the General Secretária didn’t need to know that yet. She allowed herself to smile, “The Arions find it very difficult to prosecute a war when the system is filled with Enlightenment freighters.”

If the thought of exchanging one fleet of ships for another brought the General Secretária any comfort, Casimiro gave no sign, “If that is what we must pay, it is too high.” He looked ready to spit, but Aurora doubted he could spare the water.

“Casimiro,” she began but he held up his hand.

“It is too high, but we will pay it.”

“You will?”

“I am just General Secretária of the vacuum program,” Casimiro announced, gripping his lapels again, “but if membership in your ‘Enlightenment’ will protect us from this horror, what choice do we have but to take it?”

The air almost hummed with tension until Beni asked, “Has anyone actually said why you were asked to come here?”

Aurora tossed her head in the direction of The Lance, “That answered a lot of my questions. I assume I am here to offer my protection.” She beamed inwardly; Beni would undoubtedly be the ship’s captain and the idea of protecting him appealed.

“More or less.” Casimiro shrugged, apparently recovered. “We were in fact thinking that your services would be better spent in a distraction.”

“Distraction?” Aurora turned the word over a couple of times. “How, against their fleet?”

“You will no doubt recall the counter attack we recently made against the Arion position in the Green Hills and Flat Meadows province.”

“Yes, you took back several of your missile silos.” Aurora remembered thinking what a wasted effort it’d been; the first thing the Arions had done when they’d taken the silos was steal their arsenals. But given how good her protectorate had grown at deceiving her, maybe she needed to rethink a lot of what she’d considered wasteful. “I had not heard, however, that your munitions industry had regenerated to the point where it could restock them.”

Casimiro looked uncomfortable. “In fact… it has not,” he might have been extracting one of his own organs. “However at this point numbers are not as important as location.”

Although Aurora’s education had been diverse with regard to the many, many ways people had created to kill one another; it hadn’t explained why location might be important in a missile fight. As far as her instructors had been concerned, simply possessing an armed silo was enough; its location had been a secondary consideration, generally though of in terms along the lines of ‘the further away, the better.’ Being a Protector, naturally her education had surrounded attacking silos more than defending them.

Which was why she had to resist scratching her head as she said, “Perhaps if you explained more of your plan, the importance of that detail will become apparent.”

As hard as she’d tried to disguise her ignorance, Casimiro saw right through it and his tone became condescending as he lectured, “Vectors, as any vacuum strategist will testify, are the key to a successful missile attack.”

Fortunately for Aurora, Beni was able to translate: “We’ve got enough missiles for what we want to do, but what we need are locations. The more we have, the more vectors we can attack from and the more dispersed the Arion counter-fire will have to be and the greater the chance of a successful hit”

It was entirely possible that there wasn’t a word to cover the relief Aurora felt towards him, which was just as well for her face was impassive when she said, “Thank you.” Turning to Casimiro again, she asked, “I am glad to see you are finally taking my suggestion to make a proactive attack on their fleet seriously.”

Irked that she’d guessed the mission’s secondary purpose, Casimiro tried to make it appear a minor point. “As I said, the chance of their defeating our detection grid grows daily. Our mission projections estimate that a successful strike will extend that eventual penetration by a minimum of two months.”

Aurora shook her head. “No.”

“No?” Casimiro looked surprised. “Why do you say that?”

Aurora allowed herself to smile as she turned her back on him to look on The Lance. “After all our time together, you still do not understand the nature of a Protector; we do not do things by halves; we do not attack with the intention of merely hurting an enemy. Protectors are the finest warriors in the galaxy and when we attack, our enemy is defeated. Any enemy, General Secretária. We either know victory, or we know death. There is no other alternative.”

Casimiro actually paled beneath the weight of her words and she heard him swallow before asking, “Y-you intend to destroy their fleet?”

“With your help of course.” It was Aurora’s turn to sound condescending. Smashing starships was, after all, literally what she had been born to do and as far as they’d advanced in other areas, they were children when it came to destroying warships

Still, their missiles were powerful enough to have done damage in the past. She could use the distraction they would afford.

There was only one last thing to say.

“When do we start?”

* * *

The next week passed with almost supernatural quickness. Distanced from the cycles of sun and moon by meters of aeneucrete, the base personnel found days beginning to blur together, eventually even Aurora’s biological clock began to get confused.

The outside world dwindled also. Reports of advances and retreats, losses and victories dribbled in inexorably, but few people listened. Reduced to their bare numbers, they just didn’t seem important any more.

Despite having no technical skills, Aurora was far from idle. There was always some large piece of equipment that she could move easier, faster and with more precision than her protectorates. Whenever she could grab a few moments to herself, she spent them trying to train The Lance’s crew in the rudiments of vacuum combat. Or at least those parts of it that involved running away.

Someone had taken the time to attach some Comitatus rocket pods, but Aurora had spent a good half hour lecturing Beni about The Lance’s probability of survival if he actually thought about using them; they would be little more than an irritant to any Arion ship, and that assumed the Arions could be somehow convinced to enter The Lance’s range instead of simply incinerating them at three times the distance.

That last piece of information she had revealed with reluctance. It was almost an admission that if