Ghost Fleet Read online

  Juan gave him an amused glance that said he wasn’t fooled. “Cai’s mind doesn’t work like ours, Captain. I doubt he was trying to keep anything from you; it probably just never occurred to him that you didn’t already know.”

  He nodded acceptance of that and yanked the subject back on topic. “Have you tried any?”

  “Aye that, I tried a second-age battle sim—the American Revolution. Muskets and volley fire, very fun.”

  Nick’s lips twitched in his effort not to laugh. “That does sound fun. How extensive are these sims?”

  “Very,” Juan said. “It looks like there’s sims all the way back to the start of the first age—Sumeria and onward. No prehistory, unfortunately. But I did see a sim for the Trojan War.”

  “I will have to take a look at them.” Nick leaned back in his seat and thought about it. History had never been his favorite subject, but he certainly wouldn’t mind taking a look at some historical battles. Historians and archeologists generally recognized four ages of human civilization. The first age covered the earliest civilizations from ancient Sumeria to the collapse of Rome and the first dark age. The second age covered civilization from medieval times to the collapse of Beijing and the second dark age. The third age covered the midlevel civilizations from the recovery until the first Q’Kathi invasion, and most historians argued that the span of time between the first and third Q’Kathi invasions constituted a third dark age. The fourth age, the space age, was the modern era they lived in now. Most history that went back further than the first Q’Kathi invasion was sketchy at best, when not downright suspect. So much had been lost over the centuries that historians had been known to openly weep at the gaps in the records.

  The very next day, while he made sure Cai was tucking enough food into his hollow leg to last more than an hour or two, he casually brought it up. “So, Juan tells me you have some new history sims.”

  “I do?” Cai blinked at him, his brow furrowing as he thought. “Oh! I forgot about that. Yes, the science team gave them to me. I should take a look at them.”

  “May I join you?”

  Cai’s grin was all the answer Nick needed, but the Gator said it anyway. “Of course you can. As if you even have to ask. So, what’s your pleasure?”

  “Being full of you,” Nick replied, deadpan. “Oh, you meant a sim?” He shrugged. “You pick.”

  “After I have my way with you, I think I’d like to try the first Q’Kathi war.” Cai’s gaze was direct and challenging as he called Nick’s bluff.

  “I am at your service.” Nick allowed his amusement to show.

  Cai reacted to the tease by standing up. He came around the table as Nick stood up. Cai swiftly pinned him against the table and pulled his pants down. “Bend over,” the Gator breathed in his ear.

  Nick did as Cai commanded, bending over to rest his chest and stomach on the cool, smooth polished wood of the table. Solid faux-oak, it was strong enough to bear far more than just Nick’s weight, so it didn’t even wobble as Nick spread himself upon it. Cai pushed his feet further apart and then Nick felt the hot, heavy head of Cai’s cock brushing against his pucker.

  Cool moisture suddenly trickled down his crack, and he recognized the familiar sliminess of lube, which Cai then pushed into him with a pair of fingers. He clenched and flexed his buttocks as Cai’s fingers reamed him and filled him with the slippery substance.

  When Cai’s fingers withdrew, he set himself for what was coming, forcing himself to relax, concentrating especially on his anal ring. Cai entered him; the large, crested spear point impaling him with ease. The long, hot shaft followed, filling Nick and rearranging his insides in that peculiar, pleasurable manner. Cai’s action was short and quick, pushing further into Nick with each thrust, retreating then reconquering the same territory before plunging further into the unknown. When Cai reached full penetration, he paused as he so often did, as if to savor the moment. Nick felt utterly, deliciously full, nearly split in twain and thrumming in pleasure from that sensation. His entire being focused on the long, hot rod nestled deep inside him, hyperaware of everything down to how Cai’s balls rested in the gap between his ass and package.

  The rhythm Cai set was fast and hard, but with little depth of stroke. Nick groaned in enjoyment as Cai jackhammered him into the table. His hipbones were rammed against the edge of the table while his erection bobbed below the wooden flat. It wasn’t comfortable, but Nick loved every bit of it; the pain was like a gift to savor, balancing the pleasure of Cai’s stroking inside him. Nick could feel Cai’s mind stroking him as well, an overlay of intense emotion and pleasurable thought, filling him with the assurance of Cai’s love and desire. Nick shivered in delight as he realized that Cai was reading him as well, his heart swelling with answering love and sharing the joy he felt at being this close to Cai, this full of Cai, a vessel for Cai’s love.

  They came together in a shared overflow of ecstasy that cascaded through their minds and hearts and glands and pumped out in thick white ropes of hot spunk. Cai filled Nick’s ass as he usually did, backing out slowly as he throbbed out his load of semen. His fingers stroked around Nick’s stretched hole, and as he fell free, Nick felt the now-familiar cool hardness of the anal plug entering him, holding Cai’s essence inside him. Nick knew from experience that Cai would leave it in for several hours, perhaps even overnight. It pleased him to wear the plug at Cai’s bidding. It was a very enjoyable thing to have in him.

  Cai let him up, and Nick pulled his pants up but not before allowing Cai one last fondle of his cock and balls.

  Nick grabbed Cai’s hand and planted a kiss directly atop the embedded crystal and had the pleasure of seeing Cai shudder in reaction, his lips curving into a smile. They walked hand in hand to Cai’s large console and jacked in before settling into comfortable positions on the couches. For a sim, the full connection was required. Nick plunged into the shipnet with the usual rush of expanding consciousness and building power. Beside him, Cai glowed blue and silver swirled together in a tight, intricate braiding of immense power. Cai opened the sim and they dropped further, leaving the reality of the ship behind.

  The dirt was coarse and gritty under Nick’s left hand, the air chill with hints of acrid smoke and decay, the sound of his own breathing loud in his ears, the weight of the large plasma rifle heavy in his right hand. He peered through the stygian gloom toward the large complex looming in the near distance. Cai was nearby—behind that rock over there, crouched and focused on the target the same as he was. He had the sense that there were other men behind him and to either side.

  War Leader Yeraki was a bold commander, but he wasn’t in the habit of wasting lives. If he’d committed a team this large, either the reward was worth the risk or the odds were overwhelmingly in their favor. Or both. Nick hoped it was both.

  A soft, wistful series of whistled notes sounded, and the troop moved forward, taking Nick and Cai with them. They weren’t in the first rank, but they were close enough to see what was what. A shadowy figure appeared beside him, short and slight but hard to see—he appeared black or dark grey, and his eyes, when he turned his gaze on Nick, blazed with green witchfire. His features were as shadowed as the rest of him, but his fangs were sharp, large and shockingly white.

  This is the War Leader, Nick decided, and it was a fair enough depiction, since nobody knew what he’d actually looked like. Only fragments had survived the purges—it was known that Yeraki had been a Rovani, one of the now-extinct created races that the Pure Life Church had taken such an exception to during the third age and it was known that his eyes had been emerald green. That was all that remained of any physical data history had on a being who had easily been one of the greatest military minds in history.

  The simulated War Leader led their sortie into the Q’Kathi compound, and after a while, Nick recognized the scene as the battle in which the Rovania had freed hundreds of humans from the Q’Kathi holding pens, leading them to safety before arming them and
teaching them to fight back. This raid had marked a turning point in the war, the point when the Rovania had stopped reacting to the Q’Kathi invaders and had taken the initiative at last.

  They got in, freed the humans and got out with minimal casualties. But it felt real, so real that Nick thought his bruises and scrapes would continue to pain him even after the sim ended. Tears stung his eyes when they reached safety and the freed prisoners cheered, prayed or kissed the ground as emotion overcame them. The Rovania, slipped along the sides, fading from view, mysterious feline humanoid companions now lost to history and the sim ended.

  “That was amazing,” Nick said once he’d recovered his wits.

  “Mmm,” Cai agreed. He rolled onto his side, propped his head on his fist and regarded Nick with a loving gaze. “If I can find a sim where you can play a Rovani, would you be interested?”

  “Maybe,” Nick replied, startled by the idea. “Weren’t they a slave race until their uprising?” The Rovania had risen up in revolt, overthrowing the legal rule of their human masters before they’d declared war on the Q’Kathi, leaving most people at a loss for how to view them—heroes or villains, for they had aspects of both.

  “They were,” Cai all but purred. “They were designed and bred for the sex trade.”

  Nick found himself interested. “I’ll think about it.” That’s all he felt like promising for now. He had no doubt that Cai would manage to find that sim, but he wasn’t sure he was ready for it.

  Chapter Three: Contact

  Every morning at precisely oh-five-hundred hours ship’s time, Cai entered the Astrogation Chamber for routine checks and maintenance. The setting of the clock was an arbitrary measure in the depths of space, and even with jump capability, relativity still applied. The clock was reset every time they docked at either Earth or Hevetich and fleets of ships acting together kept their clocks synched. The Laughing Owl was alone in this system and so the clock hadn’t been touched since leaving Hevetich.

  With a full dose of raw Synde in his system, Cai merged his consciousness into his ship-self, becoming the ship in a fundamental way, linked by neurologic circuitry and psi. The patter of the solar wind caressed his back, warming his outer hull to the same degree as it warmed the rocks around them. Cai checked his dampers first. Everything was operational and not a single stray wave of electromagnetic energy was escaping. The only way the Laughing Owl could be told from the asteroids would be via a visual sighting and the odds of that were vanishingly slim—space was vast and the Laughing Owl was small. A needle in a haystack, Cai thought with a certain amusement based on the needle-like tapered cylinder of his body.

  Confident that he was still masked from unfriendly sensors, Cai turned his attention inward. His checks were methodical and thorough. System by system, Cai worked his way through the ship, ensuring that everything was functioning at peak efficiency. Failing equipment, a clogged valve here, a fractured gimbal there, was flagged and routed to the appropriate sections for repair or replacement. The internal systems checks completed, Cai moved on to his eyes and ears, the ship’s sensors.

  From bow to stern he swept, looking through each sensor in turn, both external and internal. He paused on a sensor in the high-gee workout room lockers, which showed Nick in the shower, stealing a moment to admire his lover’s body, but only a moment. He moved on out of a sense of duty, flicking through sensor after sensor and flagging those that didn’t return crisp, precise data to him. When the last sensor was checked, Cai relaxed, allowing himself to just be.

  He reflected, as he often did, that he had two lives, the dreary colorless life of his physical-self and the far more colorful, rich life of his ship-self. How limited were eyes and ears compared to his sensors which could see the entire electromagnetic spectrum rather than the tiny portion of it human eyes could cope with. There was little he could do as a man that he could not also do as a ship. His trainers had told him that the longer he flew a ship, the more attuned to it he would grow.

  The neurologic circuitry had been tuned to his brainwaves when he’d first been brought to the Laughing Owl, and he had been able to merge his psyche with the ship that very first day. But Cai sensed that his trainers had been correct. The more time he spent in the Chamber, linked to the ship, the more attuned his mind grew to the ship and the ship to him.

  Lately, his sensitivity had grown by a noticeable degree. He’d always been able to connect to the shipnet without a physical connection, but now, he could sense some sensor data, too. It pleased him that his ship-self was reaching into his physical-self more and more. He imagined a perfect state of existence, where he had the physical freedom of the body while maintaining a full merge with the ship. Alas, such was not to be.

  The full immersion linkage he enjoyed was dependent in large part on the neurologic crystal array suspended directly above him and physically linked to the neurologics embedded in his bones by the mating of the crystal in his palm to the socket in the arm of the couch he reclined in. That array was more than a collection of neurologic circuits, it was a focal point, the heart of the navnet, the grouping that maintained Cai as part of the Laughing Owl and made the jump possible.

  Cai lingered in the Chamber until he sensed that another dose of raw Synde would be required to remain further. Since they weren’t in battle conditions and because he had no reason to stay, Cai relaxed his mind and allowed the linkage to end. He opened his eyes and watched the crystal array retract into the ceiling, where it would remain in a carefully shielded space until the next time Cai merged with the ship.

  On-em helped him out of the acceleration couch, and he staggered a moment before he remembered the trick of balancing on two feet. He hadn’t used all six adjuncts; he never did for the routine morning scan. Four was more than sufficient for maintenance. That left two of them free to prepare the enormous breakfast that awaited him in the dining room. Chambering took an immense amount of energy, and energy, as Cai had learned very early, came from the food he ate. The more he Chambered, the more he needed to eat. He sat down and tucked in, hardly paying attention to what he ate—Nick hadn’t cooked any of it, so he treated it as fuel rather than the seduction of Nick’s meals.

  He hadn’t been eating for more than three minutes when his head shot up as sensor data flared against nerves still abraded from the last dose of raw Synde. Jump energy! The complex wave of an impending wormhole was unmistakable to the Astrogator. He was up and moving before conscious thought finished. Si-el was already pouring Cai’s dose of raw Synde, the remainder of his adjuncts downed their smaller doses as Cai accepted his dose from Si-el’s hands. He drained the vessel, aware that Si-el was also dosing himself as the rest of the adjuncts entered the Chamber and took their positions.

  Si-el assisted Cai back onto the couch and took his own place a moment before Cai subsumed them all into the linkage, his mind expanding in the near-orgasmic rush of power that catapulted his psyche out of his organic brain and into the wires and crystals of the Laughing Owl’s inorganic nervous system. Cai focused all his sensors on the impending wormhole, pleased that he’d acted swiftly enough to Chamber before the ship arrived.

  From the bridge, Nick queried him on their private channel. “Cai? Is this safe? You just left the Chamber.”

  “We have company incoming,” Cai replied and flashed the pertinent sensor data on the bridge screens. So swiftly had Cai reacted that the slower, far more limited humans on the bridge hadn’t yet seen the building focal point of energy at the hardpoint.

  Nick reacted immediately, pulsing the shipnet as he activated the klaxon, five rapid beats repeated every five seconds. From every speaker on the ship and across the entire shipnet blared the same message, “General quarters, general quarters, all hands man your battle stations.”

  Cai returned his attention to the incoming wormhole. It was taking an awfully long time to establish itself. In full step-up, the same subjective time stretching he used in a jump, the nanoseconds crawled by. Cai
recorded every detail of the incoming jump, analyzing the patterns and the use of energy. Very inefficient, he decided and wondered at the incompetence of the other Astrogator.

  Finally, right before Cai screamed with frustration at how badly the unknown ship was performing their jump, a stable event horizon established itself and a familiar spherical ship popped through. The wormhole promptly collapsed and Cai wasn’t at all surprised, since he couldn’t see how they’d managed to open it at all, given the amount of power they’d squandered. Cai was already extrapolating their most likely point of origin as he studied the Rel ship.

  Fresh from the jump as it was, it appeared to be strangely powerless. It was moving, the momentum of the jump ensured that much, but from what Cai could tell, Sir Isaac Newton was in the driver’s seat over there. Minutes trickled by and the Rel ship slowly powered back up. Cai ran through a rapid series of jump simulations with the AI, determining what it would take to match what he was directly observing. A mechanical jump mechanism, he decided, using stored power, and the jump wipes them out so much that it takes time for their power plants to bring the ship’s systems back online. He would include his simulations and his theory with the data he sent home.

  The Rel accelerated, scooting in system, and Cai immediately calculated and projected their likely course—the Rel was heading for the hardpoint to Procyon. That’s not good, Cai realized, and sent the course projection to Nick.

  “Is there any way to send a drone through unnoticed?” Nick wanted to know.

  “Any jump is shatteringly obvious, even for something as small as a drone. They’d have to be blind to the energy flows of space not to notice.”

  “Our orders, unfortunately, are clear—we’re to observe and track only. We are not authorized to engage the enemy at this time.”