Excerpt

One

The BilatZailea arrived in the middle of a battle.

Captain Kimi Nyguta stood on the BilatZailea's bridge, hands clasped behind her back. The moment the BilatZailea arrived, it received all of the telemetry from the battle, so she spread it across the five holoscreens before her.

Someone had breached Base 20 on Nindowne. Immediately, the Armada Jefatura dispatched a flotilla, but the Jefatura had to have known or suspected something major, something they weren't telling the captains, because that flotilla included the BilatZailea and a sister ship, the EhizTari. Both were foldspace tracking vessels.

The EhizTari's presence annoyed Nyguta. All the Armada needed in a battle like this one was a single foldspace tracking vessel. Whoever had issued this order had never worked with a foldspace tracking vessel.

Either that, or this battle was more significant than she thought.

It didn't seem that way when she had arrived. The battle was already underway, and it was complicated. Much of it occurred in the space around Nindowne, and seemed to be directed at a single skip.

Skips weren't major threats, especially when faced with Dignity Vessels and Security Class Vessels. An orbiter, properly equipped, could take out a skip—unless the skip was something special.

The skip wasn't much to look at. Boxy, with runners along its side, and shuttered portals. It was well-piloted, but if it was like other skips of its kind, it had no real weaponry and inadequate defenses.

She couldn't really believe that a skip was any kind of threat. She'd seen skips like it before—the Armada had repurposed several—and none of them held more than thirty people. Even that was uncomfortable.

She hadn't checked the telemetry, but if she had to guess, the skip probably held ten to twenty at most.

Her team was monitoring the skip. She had instructed them to do so the moment the BilatZailea had come out of foldspace. She had made the short trip using the anacapa drive, because she needed to arrive quickly—and there was no quickly from where the BilatZailea had been deployed.

She also hadn't wanted the BilatZailea to be seen by the enemy. At that point, she had had no idea that an entire flotilla had been called to take on a single, small ship. She had thought she would be handling cleanup, chasing dozens of ships into foldspace.

She hadn't wanted the enemy to know that a foldspace tracking vessel was anywhere nearby. The EhizTari hadn't been as cautious, which irritated her further. The EhizTari hovered around the edges of the battle, looking conspicuous—or maybe she just thought the damn thing was conspicuous.

Which furthered her annoyance at being partnered with another ship on a mission that made partnering difficult—especially since she had never partnered with this vehicle. She didn't even know who the captain of the EhizTari was.

She wasn't even going to look that information up, which was probably petty, and she didn't care. She was annoyed, but she tried not to let her annoyance show. She wanted her team to focus on the task at hand, even if the task seemed surprisingly small.

Her bridge team was one of the best she'd ever worked with. They were behind her, their workstations staggering upwards and curved around her, almost as if she stood in the center of an amphitheater. Screens decorated the walls—screens she normally called useless, because the BilatZailea spent most of its time in foldspace, which didn't have relevant views.

Although, she had to admit, she'd been using the screens off and on all day, from the moment she'd arrived. She wanted to see this possible Fleet vessel whose crew had somehow invaded Base 20, and was now under attack from almost all of the Armada vessels in the sector.

The backs of her knees pushed up against the stupidly designed captain's chair. The BilatZailea had been designed as a Fleet foldspace search vehicle a long time ago, and modified to become an Armada foldspace tracking vehicle. The engineers had left the stupid captain's chair, with the idea that Nyguta might have to spend days in it while she was working.

Instead, she spent days bumping up against it because she preferred to stand when she was on the bridge.

She watched the fighters stream after the skip. It had left Nindowne's orbit just as she arrived, skating past all the space junk the Armada left in place around the planet, so that ships thought twice before even trying to enter orbit.

The skip was moving at a faster clip than she had expected. Instead of heading away from the flotilla, the skip had headed toward it, confusing the fighters at first.

Then they rallied, and swarmed around it, firing, the shots somehow going wide or missing it entirely. The shots didn't seem to bank off of it, though, so it didn't have unusually great shields.

Apparently, it just had an unusually great pilot.

That skip had to be heading somewhere. She scanned the ships nearby, and saw one she didn't recognized. It had a label in Old Fleet Standard. Shadow.

That made her skin crawl. She had no idea how an old Fleet ship got in the middle of a flotilla.

Then the skip vanished.

She leaned forward and had her screens refresh the action before her, but even as she did so, she saw—out of the corner of her eye—that some of her team members were doing the same thing.

"Did it just disappear?" she asked, worrying that it had gone into foldspace without opening a foldspace window. No ship that she had ever seen had done that before. Would that make the skip harder to track? Was that why the Jefatura had wanted both the BilatZailea and the EhizTari? Because the skip had new technology?

Then, before her crew said anything, she looked for the Shadow. Instead of a ship called Shadow, she saw what had been a Fleet Dignity Vessel, repurposed into an Armada vessel.

She cursed.

"The damn skip was ghosted," she said. Not just the skip, but that other ship as well. The Shadow.

"Yes," said Mikai Rockowitz, her second-in-command. He wasn't so much answering her as providing quiet confirmation.

He was a balding, wizened man who never wanted his own command. He reluctantly became her second, only after she begged repeatedly, mostly because he knew as much (or maybe more) about foldspace tracking than she did.

"The actual skip is far from the fighters," he said, as he sent her coordinates for the skip.

She didn't need them. She had already spotted the real skip, trundling forward at a much slower speed than its ghost.

She had been right, though: the pilot of the skip was unusually gifted.

Ghosting was difficult. The pilot, while under attack, created a false image of the ship, and that image had to hold up while the attackers went after it. Usually most ghosts vanished the moment laser weapons fire hit. This ghost ship had survived hundreds of shots, and confused two dozen fighters which were seeing it up close.

And, on top of it, the pilot had ghosted a destination. That took incredible know-how and the ability to work on the fly.

In spite of herself, she was impressed.

But the pilot tipped his hand. His skip wasn't heading toward a base somewhere. The skip was heading toward another ship.

There was no way that destination ship would be near the flotilla. That ship had to be waiting somewhere protected.

If she were hiding a large ship—probably a Dignity Vessel named Shadow—she would place it near a moon. Not near Nindowne, though. And there was only one planet with a moon nearby.

She had her equipment scan the area near that planet, and instantly saw the destination ship.

It was an ancient Dignity Vessel ship, but it wasn't called Shadow.

It was called the Ivoire.

She let out a breath.

The actual skip had sped up. It appeared to be vibrating—either from the speed or maybe some damage sustained earlier. If she had to guess, she would assume that the skip was about to break up.

Given how ragged the skip looked, it might not even make the Ivoire.

The fighters realized their error and corrected, and, she noticed on the screens before her, a few ships had finally managed to follow the correct skip.

The fighters fired on it as they closed in. They shot at it, but either the shots went wild or something was protecting it.

The skip propelled itself toward the Ivoire, and for a moment, she thought it was going to ram the side. And then she realized what was going to happen.

"Prepare to launch into foldspace," she said to her team.

"Yes, Captain," said Rockowitz. He was probably already prepared, given his tone of voice. She hadn't given that order as much for him as she had for the rest of the team.

Something was niggling at her. Maybe the presence of the EhizTari had nothing to do with incompetence. Maybe the presence of the EhizTari showed that the Jefatura thought that Base 20 had been breached by Fleet personnel.

All that the Armada had known when Nyguta had received her orders was that the personnel who had entered Base 20 had used Fleet equipment. Those people had some ancient Fleet identification devices.

From there, the Armada had assumed—maybe hoped—that the invaders were actual members of the Fleet.

Nyguta felt a shiver of excitement. For millennia, the Armada had hoped to find the Fleet again, to extract a revenge long in the making.

She wanted that as much as anyone else, but she couldn't let it color her thinking. Not now.

Right now, her best course of action was to ignore the EhizTari and do the work as if the BilatZailea were the only foldspace tracking vessel in the vicinity.

Besides, the captain of the EhizTari hadn't responded to hails, which wasn't that uncommon in this kind of situation. Unnecessary communication was discouraged and, at the moment, neither vessel knew if they were even needed.

Now Nyguta knew: she would be tracking an ancient Fleet-built Dignity Vessel which, more likely than not, had a powerful anacapa drive.

The BilatZailea's anacapa drive was powerful as well, and in prime condition. The BilatZailea might have a problem, though, if the Ivoire's drive was as old as the ship herself. Because that drive could malfunction in ways no one completely understood.

Nyguta silently cursed under her breath. The Armada's Legion of Engineers still hadn't completely deciphered all of the secrets of the anacapa drive. The Fleet didn't know how the drive worked either—or at least, hadn't known it millennia ago, when they abandoned the Armada's founders.

The Fleet had stolen the anacapa drives thousands of years ago, and had been able to replicate them, but not reverse engineer the technology itself.

The Armada had made reverse engineering the anacapa technology a major part of its raison d'être, but hadn't yet completely figured out how the tech worked.

If the Ivoire's anacapa had brought them to this time period, and they were seeking a way home, then following the Ivoire into foldspace was doubly risky. Nyguta had tracked ships that had been displaced in time through foldspace, but that was tricky as well. The key was to find the ship while the crew was still alive, without trapping her crew in the process.

She'd managed, but it hadn't always been easy.

Tracking in real time was different. She wouldn't have a chance to think through the options.

The Ivoire fired on the smaller ships around it, and she watched that with trepidation as well. So many things could cause a launch into foldspace to go awry, and getting caught in weapons' fire was one of them, particularly if the anacapa drive was activated as a ship got hit.

She had to stay out of the line of fire, monitor the Ivoire, and follow it, should it jump. Ideally, the BilatZailea should enter foldspace at the exact same point as the Ivoire but she wasn't certain if she could do that.

"Contact the Indarra and Hirugarren," she said to DeMarcus Habibi. He was slender and soft-spoken, and had served on a dozen ships before joining hers nearly a decade before.

As a result, he knew someone on almost every ship, and could reach the right person to help her execute her commands quickly. He had served on the Indarra, which was a redesigned Dignity Vessel. He knew the captain of the Hirugarren, which had started its existence as a Ready Vessel.

Those two ships had long since been co-opted by the Armada and had more than enough firepower to defend the BilatZailea, so Nyguta could concentrate on the foldspace tracking.

Habibi looked up at her, his brown eyes sharp. He probably knew what she was going to say, but he let her say it anyway.

"They'll need to flank us as we approach the Ivoire's position," Nyguta said. "We want to enter foldspace as close to that spot as possible."

"And the EhizTari?" Habibi asked.

"We'll let them handle their own journey." She wasn't going to worry about any of the Armada ships. She was going to concentrate on her own.

Her team was tracking telemetry and coordinates and anacapa energy. They would know the instant that the Ivoire started its transition into foldspace.

In the meantime, she would watch what was happening to the Ivoire.

A cargo bay door opened on the side of the Ivoire. If Nyguta were in charge of attacking this unknown enemy, she would attack them right now. They had to drop shields to get that skip inside.

The fighters and the other ships had to know that. She expected to see more laser fire, but she didn't see any.

Partly because the skip came in fast and hot, hot enough that unless the Ivoire had some kind of plan in place, the skip would ram through interior walls. The cargo bay door slammed shut just as fast, and something winked around the Ivoire—most likely the reinstatement of the shield.

"Now," she said to her crew.

The BilatZailea sped forward, heading toward the Ivoire's position. The Indarra and Hirugarren flanked her, just as requested.

A foldspace window opened to the Ivoire's side, and the Ivoire launched itself through.

Then the EhizTari zoomed past the BilatZailea.

Nyguta muttered, "Idiots," and hoped none of her crew had heard.

Although they probably would agree. The EhizTari was trying to enter the same foldspace launch window as the Ivoire, a truly dangerous and mostly reckless move.

But the launch window closed, and the EhizTari overshot the coordinates. It turned around, creating its own foldspace opening at the exact same moment.

Rockowitz cursed. Habibi said, "We really should warn them—" But stopped himself as the EhizTari disappeared into their own foldspace launch window.

"Maybe it'll work," Nyguta said, as much to herself as to her crew.

She couldn't think about the EhizTari right now, though. She had to focus on her own mission.

"All right," she said to her team. "The Ivoire has gone into foldspace. We have the exact coordinates, right?"

The person responsible for combining everyone's information into one set of coordinates was Jaci Intxausti. She tucked her long silver-and-black hair behind her ears, and frowned.

That frown caught Nyguta. Intxausti usually didn't make faces before answering questions. Perhaps the information contradicted itself. That happened at times, and while Nyguta could program for it, she preferred not to. It was better to use a human eye on it, because the machines were more likely to either use an average or some other formula to choose the most likely set of coordinates.

Relying on the tech for decision-making was what made other foldspace tracking vessels less accurate than the BilatZailea was. When Nyguta got conflicting information, she threw it all out and started again.

"Jaci?" Nyguta said, wondering if she had to repeat the question.

"I have the coordinates," Intxausti said. "I was checking to see if there was any unusual anacapa energy since that ship we're chasing was reported lost five thousand years ago."

So her team had researched the name. Without a request from her. Which was why this team was the best she'd ever worked with.

The Ivoire had been lost in time, probably through foldspace. That made it both less interesting (she had been hoping to find the Fleet) and more interesting.

"Maybe," said Tiberius Kibbuku, one of the researchers. He rarely spoke up, so a "maybe" from him was as powerful as half the sentences the rest of her team spoke. "Maybe it had been lost."

Nyguta was about to follow up, but Intxausti spoke first.

"Less of a maybe than you'd think," Intxausti said. "I investigated the moment I saw the identification. I used several Fleet databases from several time periods. The ship matches every descriptive point, including the name."

Kibbuku looked like he wanted to argue, but Nyguta didn't have time for that. She held up a hand, silencing him and directed her question at Intxausti.

"Problems, then?" Nyguta asked.

"Not that I can tell," Intxausti said, "but I don't have time to do a thorough examination. If the ship is here, it got lost in foldspace like everyone thought."

"Maybe," Kibbuku said again, a bit more forcefully this time.

Nyguta didn't look at him. She wanted to hear Intxausti out.

"And," Intxausti said, "if it did, that means there could be something wrong with the anacapa."

She put a slight emphasis on the word "could," which led to Nyguta's question.

"But you don't think so," Nyguta said.

"I wouldn't be going in and out of foldspace if I knew I had a malfunctioning anacapa drive, would you?" Intxausti asked.

"That's not definitive," Kibbuku said, and he was right. Intxausti's point was speculative, but the speculation was a good one.

If this was the Ivoire and if it was piloted by the same crew that had gotten lost in foldspace, then they wouldn't venture in and out of foldspace easily, even if they were being followed.

But that was a lot of "ifs." For all Nyguta knew, for all her team knew, the Ivoire had been abandoned and then stolen by yet another group.

Although that didn't really explain the Fleet signatures that the Jefatura had picked up in the alarms around Base 20.

Figuring out what the Ivoire was mattered less than their mission. Which the EhizTari was already fulfilling.

"Are you worried about following the Ivoire into foldspace?" Nyguta asked.

"I certainly wouldn't have tried to use their foldspace window," Intxausti said, the judgmental tone in her voice matching the one in Nyguta's head.

"Neither would I," Nyguta said. "But are you worried about tracking them?"

Intxausti looked at Kibbuku, not Nyguta, which surprised her. The look was one of consultation, not disagreement.

"There's a lot we don't know," Kibbuku said.

It seemed like he was saying the obvious, but he wasn't that kind of man. Instead, he wanted everyone to make the same logical leaps he did. And sometimes Nyguta wasn't up for it.

"About the Ivoire?" she asked.

"About foldspace, anacapa drives, and tracking," he said. "If they're malfunctioning, and we get too close, are we in danger?"

He shrugged, not willing to add the last sentence. The one that included we don't know.

They didn't know, and they didn't have the luxury to figure it out.

"Well," Nyguta said, "if they are creating something dangerous through their foldspace window, we might not be able to track them at all. Have you thought of that?"

Her question was a bit aggressive. His eyes met hers. She usually didn't talk to her team that way.

"I think we've waited long enough for our own safety's sake," Nyguta said. "Take us to the coordinates, Jaci, and open a foldspace window."

Intxausti didn't respond verbally. Instead, she executed the command.

The BilatZailea reached those coordinates in less than a minute, and as it did, a foldspace window opened. Nyguta braced herself, something she normally didn't do when she went into foldspace.

The BilatZailea entered the window, vibrating slightly as it did so. Nyguta let out a small sigh. The vibration was normal. The Armada's engineers had managed to tone down the entry—which used to be a lot bumpier and sometimes violent—but still hadn't been able to get rid of the vibration.

No one knew what it was about foldspace that differed from regular space or why entry into (and out of) foldspace caused something akin to turbulence. Nyguta paid attention to the changes, thinking they might have an impact on foldspace tracking, but so far, nothing had made much of a difference.

Something, though, had led her to believe that entering foldspace this time would be more difficult. Maybe the discussion with Intxausti. Maybe a sense.

Everything had been odd on this trip.

She didn't think foldspace would be any different.